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SiCortex Catapult: Desktop Supercomputer

Originally published by "dbarker" on 2007-11-16 15:10:00Z

SC072 | Products | SiCortex: You think your desktop hardware is fast, buddy? Look what sits inside this little desktop tower, just in case I have to accurately model a hurricane season or something. Note the processor count and RAM numbers.

The SiCortex SC072 “Catapult” is the personal version of the SiCortex family of revolutionary HPC computer systems. The system is a complete 72-processor cluster packaged in a whisper-quiet, low-power desk side cabinet using less than 200 watts of power. Each SC072 has a 48-GByte memory system, 2-gigabit Ethernet ports, and up to three (3) optional PCI Express™ cards, each operating at a peak speed of 2 GBytes/sec. The cabinet has space for up to six (6) industry-standard disk drives.

This is the desktop version of their SC5832 which is a Top500 machine running over 5,000 nodes and 8TB of RAM.

Disclaimer: SiCortex is a Blend client.

Comment by "An o Neamus" on 2007-11-17 14:55:00Z
Erm, you think that's fast buddy? A 400USD Sony PS3 will give you 218GFlops on Linux as opposed to 72GFlops on this 15000USD machine.
Comment by "sumguy" on 2007-11-17 16:23:00Z
So much for WINTEL... PS3 is the answer.
Comment by "Thorns" on 2007-11-17 07:29:00Z
To think that a *PS3* can compare to a cluster system... lol
Comment by "Barry" on 2007-11-18 18:11:00Z
Yeah, but can it play Crysis :-)
Comment by "SiPie" on 2007-11-18 11:01:00Z
Where does it say this thing gives you 72GFlops? I never read that???
Comment by "Deane" on 2007-11-18 16:07:00Z
Folks, the raw processing power isn't really the point. I'm impressed by the numbers posted by the PS3 and all, and perhaps I should have gotten my gigaflops and teraflops straight before I presented this as a raw speed machine. The point of the Catapult is that it runs the same Linux distro and the same processing architecture as SiCortex's other machines -- the big ones that have hundreds or thousands of processors in them. The Top500 machines. The idea is that you'd buy one of the big ones for seven figures, and a Catapult together. Then you create your simulations and apps on the Catapult, and know that they'll port directly to the big iron. Same OS, same architecture, etc. It's essentially a scaled-down test and dev environment for the shops that have one of SiCortex's monsters in their datacenters.