Soon to Be Out
Tired of UberGeeks
kicking sand in your face when they whip out their twin
Xeon processor PC? Well, just wait until you see the envy
when you slide this Orion 96 node box
from under your desk. That's right, 96 processors, 150
gigaflops sustained (300 peak), 192GB of RAM (192 gigabytes of
RAM?!?!?), and up to 9.6 terabytes of disk storage. All in a
box that's not much larger than your run-of-the-mill server
tower (Okay, maybe a little larger than your standard full
tower case. The point is it's in a case that you can plug into
any wall outlet, flip one switch to turn it on and doesn't
require a team of workers to keep it running).
It runs the Linux 2.6 kernel (you didn't think this would be running Windows XP Home now did you?) and includes the "standard parallel programming libraries, including MPI, PVM and SGE." [I think I got the links right but I'm not into cluster programming so I could be wrong on some of them.]
If the thought of selling your house to afford one of these ("priced at less than $100,000") is beyond what you want to do you can instead get the 12-node version ("priced at less than $10,000) that sits on your desktop. Note that neither is currently available for purchase although both are slated for release Real Soon Now.