Personal Super Computer

From eWEEK.com, eNews & Views, August 17, 2006 Photo essay at Linux World Expo

TYAN Typhoon PSC (http://www.tyan.com/PRODUCTS/html/clusterservers.html)

The PSC stands for "Personal Super Computer." Supporting up to eight AMD Opteron HE CPUs and up to 64GB of DDR333/400 RAM, the Typhoon PSC is designed to tackle your research and other supercomputing needs. Those 30+ Gigaflops of desk-side processing power will set you back around $10,000 including CPUs and memory.

In perspective, Seymour Roger Cray sold the first 160 Cray-1 Super Computer in 1977, for 8.86 million USD. The speed was between 80 to 240 Megaflops. The first IBM PC when purchased with the upgrades like monitor, 512k of ram, and printer sold for about 5,000 USD.

What is a flops. Flops is Floating Point Operations Per Second. The "s" represents per second and does mean plural. Note the list below.

Prefix, Symbol, and Name

tera , T, Trillion 1 thousand x Billion
giga, G, Billion 1 thousand x Million
mega, M , Million 1 thousand x Thousand
kilo, k , Thousand just what it is

Now all is needed is some storage!





Pogo's StorageWare DA360 (http://www.pogolinux.com/storage/index.html) has 7.5TB of storage. Looks like it can be ordered as takeout.

Will get back to Google trends and SBC later. This was just to fun to pass up. How many sessions do you think this home super computer could host?

Until the next post,

Steve