Ghetto Supercomputer

11 Responses to Ghetto Supercomputer

1. lurker says:

   2/9/2006 at 4:32 pm

   Its x86 “advanced accumulator” core architecture sucks, though. Think cell.
2. jasmine says:

   2/9/2006 at 4:36 pm

   Uh… it’s an Opteron machine. That means that its core doesn’t even resemble x86. In fact, in Long Mode (as it runs, since it’s on 64bit Linux) there are sixteen 64-bit general purpose registers. It’s very much a load-store architecture.
3. The Flamin' Frink says:

   2/9/2006 at 11:39 pm

   Shoebox?! Luxury! When I were an admin we had to house sixteen E4500s in a crisp bag.

   Gigabit?! Ohhh, we used to dream of Gigabit networks! We had to get up half an hour before going to bed to connect up the the SCSI RAID with a length of old flex which our team leader would use to thrash us within an inch of our lives when he got in the building, about 11:15.

   2TBytes?!?! … Fuckit, you get the idea.

   Tell that to the young ‘uns these days and they’ll you to piss off you smelly old git, and get out of our office before we call the police. Bastards.
4. lurker says:

   3/9/2006 at 1:23 pm

   You sure made me curious; I’ll have a look at the Opteron specs.

   However, in terms of processing power you could have done much better by not using AMD _nor_ intel but tried IBM instead (assuming that AMD was no political but a technical desicion). But that’s probably just me being sick of all that compatibility legacy you pay a lot of money for when buying state of the art PCs instead of putting said money into an architecture that _really_ rocks. Current AMD and intel not-so-much-CISC-anymore CISC cores are an improvement but far away from being the real thing.

   You surely built an excellent machine with what hardware you used, though. What’s the total in Euros :) ?
5. jasmine says:

   3/9/2006 at 3:36 pm

   I paid 170 euros for the motherboard. The rest of the parts I had surplus. So, er, no, I really couldn’t have done better by going for IBM.

   As for my choice of architecture- in this case it was constrained by the availability of free processors. If someone had given me a matched pair of quad PPC970FX chips, I guess I’d have been building an IBM machine instead. (Yes, I like PowerPC a lot. I’ve ported Linux to two different PowerPC platforms and I have three- count ‘em, three- PowerPC based Macs.)

   Oh, and in terms of MIPS or MFLOPS per package, the AMD chips (which are, in fact, extremely different to Intel ones) are faster than PowerPC 970, which is the current king of the desktop-grade PPC castle.
6. Dan says:

   11/9/2006 at 5:07 pm

   Shoebox-based computing is all very groovy, but since cardboard isn’t renowned for it’s EM radiation-dampening effects, doesn’t it make your TV and Radio go all squiggly?

   Are those dual-core Opterons then? Suh-weet coherent hypertransport link goodness! Myself I’m waiting for Lightwave and After Effects to be ported to OSX x86 then I’ll be investing in teh shiny new hardware. Though probably a wee bit pricier than your box ;) Damn you Apple.
7. jasmine says:

   11/9/2006 at 11:11 pm

   My TV’s entirely digital cable so I’m safe- more than 80% of Swiss homes have cable, so I am pretty sure I don’t interfere with anyone.

   The Opterons are old ones I managed to pick up in a dark corner (someone was breaking a machine and giving away the old bits). There are only two cores in the system, but boy are they fast cores.
8. mas says:

   20/9/2006 at 8:49 pm

   Where did you find 2TB of harddrives?
   all sata?
9. jasmine says:

   21/9/2006 at 1:25 am

   In a shop- most of them are on Firewire. Only the internal 80G drive is on SATA. I have a lot of big hard drives to support my music collection and video production. An hour of DV video is about thirty gigs, and I usually shoot about fifteen times as much as I use in any video. I can’t bring myself to delete anything… weak, aren’t I?
10. Jacob says:

    16/1/2008 at 12:22 pm

    Too bad it looks like a Radion 7000 video card.
11. jasmine says:

    18/1/2008 at 12:50 pm

    Who cares? The machine runs headless.