A $5300 PC Challenges A $4.6 Million Supercomputer

[schouwla]

This disussion it not so much about CPU architecture as it is using the GPU obvious vector adavntages over the CPU.

I agree that AMD firestream API might be a little smarter at using CPUs and GPUs for the same job.

Looking forward to some major progress in this field really soon.

Lars

 

[schouwla]

As someone already pointed out why did they not buy a Tesla
e.g. NVIDIA Tesla™ D870 $5000
Achieve up to 700 GFLOPS of performance (1 TeraFLOP peak) with both C870 GPUs

 

[hughyhunter]

As someone already pointed out why did they not buy a Tesla
e.g. NVIDIA Tesla™ D870 $5000
Achieve up to 700 GFLOPS of performance (1 TeraFLOP peak) with both C870 GPUs

They wanted to compare consumer level (gaming)... The average joe doesnt buy a Tesla... They buy 8800GT's.

 

[Guest]

[citation][nom]Jay-D[/nom]Why the inherent bias against AMD? They chose AMD to save money? So instead of paying an outrageous $5500 for a Core2Quad system, they paid a more reasonable $5300 for a Phenom CPU + mobo? LMAO. As the above poster said, AMD have had an advantange on memory and system bandwidth ever since the day the Athlon 64 first came out. This is exactly why there are so many more supercomputers running Opterons than Xeons...[/citation]

Well, the reason in this case is... currently only MSI K9NA2 Platinum -which is an AMD mainboard- that has 4 PCI-express 16x slots with spacing evenly (2 slots each), which allows 4 9800 gx2 combination. The Intel platform only has 3 PCI-express slots at most (either nvidia or skulltrail).

[citation][nom]schouwla[/nom]As someone already pointed out why did they not buy a Teslae.g. NVIDIA Tesla? D870 $5000Achieve up to 700 GFLOPS of performance (1 TeraFLOP peak) with both C870 GPUs[/citation]

Of course for price reason. With 4x 9800 gx2, this $5300 system has theoretical peak of 4 TFLOPS, compared to $5000 Tesla one.

 

[dittopb]

Quad CrossFire (8X+8X+8X+8X)}; 4X per GPU
Do you think there's enough bandwidth to feed the GPUs?

 

[schouwla]

Also ATI seems to be double precission floating points where as Nvidia does not. So it sucks for Monte Carlo simulations.

Lars

 

[Guest]

Well, the reason in this case is... currently only MSI K9NA2 Platinum -which is an AMD mainboard- that has 4 PCI-express 16x slots with spacing evenly (2 slots each), which allows 4 9800 gx2 combination. The Intel platform only has 3 PCI-express slots at most (either nvidia or skulltrail).

But the article suggests that it was chosen to save an amount of money equal to < 5% of the total cost of the system, which is just absurd... Aside from the additional PCI-E slot, AMDs integrated memory controller more than makes up for the nominal loss of IPC. Regardless, I have no doubt that there was some serious thought put into the components the team used, and that cost was not a factor.

 

[Guest]

My dual 8800gts 320mb gets slightly higher than that score, with an x2 6000+, haha sad.

 

[jabliese]

To all the hardware critics out there, they did not build the machine yesterday. Lighten up, you will live longer.

 

[grieve]

3 year old supercomputer compared to new technology.

Lets see a 2008 $4.6M supercomputer rock that old POS.

Quote:
"Compared to the 512-processor, $4.6M CalcUA supercomputer purchased in 2005, the PC can be more than a match."

 

[techguy911]

This is nice how about next month doing the same test with 4 gtx 280's .