New Cray Super Computer, with Windows loaded

[sje]

The base eight core Mac Pro includes a few more things like a high end dual display output video card, analog and digital audio I/O, Firewire at 400 and 800 Mbps, dual level DVD burner, corded keyboard and mouse (I don't like either one), space for a second optical drive, space for 32 GB RAM (maybe 64 GB when the DIMMs become available) and four internal fast SATA drive racks. That's a lot for US$2,800 and it runs Mac O/S X that's solidly based on OpenBSD. And X Windows and an SDK are included for free.

But the faster models cost more. Much more. Going form 2.8 GHz to 3.0 costs US$800, and the jump to 3.2 GHz is $1,600 over the base model.

Once set up, a Mac Pro can run headless just like its Xserve cousin.

One downside is that in exchange for a clean internal layout and easily user serviceable upgrading, a Mac Pro is bigger than a traditional tower. For a lot of users, it's not a desktop but a "desk-under". Eight of them will take up much more volume than the Cray Mini.

There is no up front LCD touch panel on a Mac Pro like there is on a Cray Mini. In fact, the only visual indicator on the front of a Mac Pro is a tiny white LED that indicates power and sleep status. A Cray Mini will be much more visually impressive to any visitors.

Apple does not offer an installation service visit as does Cray. I suppose for the thousands of dollars Cray charges for this, a third party installer would travel to the site and plug in a Mac Pro and set up the administrator account.

I own an earlier Mac Pro model; it's dual Xeon with two cores per CPU. It runs at "only" 2.66 GHz with a 667 MHz memory interface. It's as snappy today as when I got it two years ago; this may be in part to me adding 8 GB RAM to the stingy 1 GB RAM that came standard. The only service the box needs is a monthly cleaning fo the front grille as the forced air cooling tends to suck up a lot of cat hair.

[bob]

Intel Skulltrail D5400XS = $579
Intel E5430 = 2 x $425 = $850
4GB DDR 800 FBDIMMS A-DATA = $150
2x Tuniq 120 towers = $100
Good 1000+ watt P = $200

Everything mentioned up here is around $1850 ... add to that a normal PCI Xpress VGA card, a hard disk, DVD Drive and a LCD monitor and you could probably get this powerful system for around $2100 to $2200 all inclusive (depending on the size of the hard disk and monitor). I guarantee anyone with this system that he can run it 24/7 at 3.2 Ghz by simply changing the memory from 667 Mhz to 800 Mhz and simply going into the BIOS and adding the first voltage setting. The temps with the Tuniq Towers at 3.2 Ghz would be much less that the temperatures of a normal HSF at the default 2.66 Ghz.

I guess you could setup 10 of these in an array and connect them by network and that would cost around $17,000. That would be 80 cores at 3.2 Ghz and would probably run on the cluster windows that the Cray is running on. I cannot imagine what an 80 core Cray would cost, but I am sure it is much more than that.

The problem is the cray shares memory, a cluster is far less useful for a single chess engine. You get what you pay for, as always...

[CThinker]

For a better deal on just about any configuration, I'd use Mac Pro boxes. Each has two of the same four core Xeon processor, except that the Macs can be optioned with 3.2 GHz speeds instead of the base 2.8 GHz. Each can be configured with up to 32 GB of fast FB-DIMM RAM. (Buy the RAM from a third party, of course.)

http://store.apple.com/us_smb_78313/bro ... ly/mac_pro

The base eight core Mac Pro goes for US$2,800 retail which is rather less than the US$9,000 starter price for the Cray Mini. The Mac also comes standard with a pair of 1 Gb Ethernet ports, and fast slots for adding fiber or other high speed networking cards.

For those with money but without much cabinet space, Apple also has an Xserve rackmount with similar performance.

http://store.apple.com/us_smb_78313/bro ... ily/xserve

8 cores per board is considered mediocre in the IT world.

The world has moved to 24 cores per board. Just stack three of these, and you get more cores than that Cray, for about the same space.
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/en ... 54575.html
http://www.dell.com/content/products/pr ... =bsd&cs=04
http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4450/

These should also be more efficient because you have 24 cores sharing memory. Lastly, you have a choice from different vendors.

[bob]

For a better deal on just about any configuration, I'd use Mac Pro boxes. Each has two of the same four core Xeon processor, except that the Macs can be optioned with 3.2 GHz speeds instead of the base 2.8 GHz. Each can be configured with up to 32 GB of fast FB-DIMM RAM. (Buy the RAM from a third party, of course.)

http://store.apple.com/us_smb_78313/bro ... ly/mac_pro

The base eight core Mac Pro goes for US$2,800 retail which is rather less than the US$9,000 starter price for the Cray Mini. The Mac also comes standard with a pair of 1 Gb Ethernet ports, and fast slots for adding fiber or other high speed networking cards.

For those with money but without much cabinet space, Apple also has an Xserve rackmount with similar performance.

http://store.apple.com/us_smb_78313/bro ... ily/xserve

8 cores per board is considered mediocre in the IT world.

The world has moved to 24 cores per board. Just stack three of these, and you get more cores than that Cray, for about the same space.
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/en ... 54575.html
http://www.dell.com/content/products/pr ... =bsd&cs=04
http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4450/

These should also be more efficient because you have 24 cores sharing memory. Lastly, you have a choice from different vendors.

Those are apples to oranges comparisons. It is one thing to use a sort of "blade" approach to add processors to a machine, where the backplane uses something like our infiniband dell cluster. But that is message-passing using TCP/IP. That's a far cry from a shared-memory architecture such as the Cray. Chess programs don't use clusters and message passing because it is a very difficult problem, whereas everyone is using shared memory...

[sje]

The problem is the cray shares memory, a cluster is far less useful for a single chess engine. You get what you pay for, as always...

The big ticket Cray machines had pervasive shared memory. but this little guy has shared memory only between the two CPUs on each blade:

http://www.cray.com/Products/CX1/Produc ... tions.aspx

The optional and expensive Infiniband 20 Gbps fabric can bring down the packet latency below 200 ns, but it's still not shared memory.

[bob]

The problem is the cray shares memory, a cluster is far less useful for a single chess engine. You get what you pay for, as always...

The big ticket Cray machines had pervasive shared memory. but this little guy has shared memory only between the two CPUs on each blade:

http://www.cray.com/Products/CX1/Produc ... tions.aspx

The optional and expensive Infiniband 20 Gbps fabric can bring down the packet latency below 200 ns, but it's still not shared memory.

OK, I had thought this was a different product that was a traditional NUMA shared memory box. They had talked about doing a "small form factor" machine like that a couple of years ago at a supercomputing conference...

Blade stuff is neat, all three of our clusters are based on this. But it is still message passing (we do have infiniband if one wants to use MPI/PVM to produce message-passing applications).

[CThinker]

For a better deal on just about any configuration, I'd use Mac Pro boxes. Each has two of the same four core Xeon processor, except that the Macs can be optioned with 3.2 GHz speeds instead of the base 2.8 GHz. Each can be configured with up to 32 GB of fast FB-DIMM RAM. (Buy the RAM from a third party, of course.)

http://store.apple.com/us_smb_78313/bro ... ly/mac_pro

The base eight core Mac Pro goes for US$2,800 retail which is rather less than the US$9,000 starter price for the Cray Mini. The Mac also comes standard with a pair of 1 Gb Ethernet ports, and fast slots for adding fiber or other high speed networking cards.

For those with money but without much cabinet space, Apple also has an Xserve rackmount with similar performance.

http://store.apple.com/us_smb_78313/bro ... ily/xserve

8 cores per board is considered mediocre in the IT world.

The world has moved to 24 cores per board. Just stack three of these, and you get more cores than that Cray, for about the same space.
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/en ... 54575.html
http://www.dell.com/content/products/pr ... =bsd&cs=04
http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4450/

These should also be more efficient because you have 24 cores sharing memory. Lastly, you have a choice from different vendors.

Those are apples to oranges comparisons. It is one thing to use a sort of "blade" approach to add processors to a machine, where the backplane uses something like our infiniband dell cluster. But that is message-passing using TCP/IP. That's a far cry from a shared-memory architecture such as the Cray. Chess programs don't use clusters and message passing because it is a very difficult problem, whereas everyone is using shared memory...

I doubt that this Cray uses shared memory. If it is, then why would they have to use Windows HPC? Any Windows Server would do.

My impression is that this particular Cray is just an expensive and slow version of what Dell, HP, IBM and Sun have.

[sje]

OK, I had thought this was a different product that was a traditional NUMA shared memory box. They had talked about doing a "small form factor" machine like that a couple of years ago at a supercomputing conference...

Given the suggested retail price of the Cray CX1, it's easy to have made the assumption that it's got fast NUMA. My assumption is that the prices are somewhat flexible and that deals are available for big purchasers like DoD/GSA.

Just about every big centralized computing project I've heard of is using some flavor of 64 bit Unix (Linux, OpenBSD, etc.) and Microsoft is nowhere to be seen. But maybe Cray thinks it can make a few bucks pushing Windows HPC; maybe Microsoft is subsidizing the marketing effort.

[sje]

I like the idea of a front panel LCD touchscreen for quick visual inspection and maintenance. Having a touchscreen is a feature that I think will filter down to high end consumer units.

I note that the CX1 has a pager notification feature. Is this implemented via the Internet or is it handled by a modem connected to a local phone line?