Author: Steve Lim
Date: 17:27:25 08/30/04
http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,95581,00.html The rise of servers and workstations based on Intel Corp.'s chips led to significant declines in the prices of technical workstations, but the performance of those systems hasn't kept up with the improvements enjoyed within the supercomputing world, Hunter said. A modern supercomputer can run at well over 1 trillion floating point operations per second (1 TFLOPS), whereas a technical workstation based on Intel's Xeon processors is much closer to a PC in terms of performance, he said. Scientists looking for floating-point performance who don't want to spend millions on a supercomputer have resorted to clustering technology, Hunter said. Clusters are an inexpensive way of amassing supercomputing power, but they are difficult to maintain and they force scientists to coordinate with colleagues to schedule time on the cluster, he said. The Orion Cluster Workstation takes the idea of a cluster and puts it inside a desktop machine. The company's first product, the DT-12, is a 12-node cluster that measures 18.4 in. long by 24 in. wide by 3.8 in. high -- which is about the same size as a conventional desktop PC. But this PC puts out about 18 GFLOPS of sustained performance and 36 GFLOPS of peak performance under certain conditions. .... read on http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,95581,00.html
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