A cost that we didn't really address in class is the cost of the space that these machines take up. A metric that Sun introduced to account for this is SWaP (Space, Watts, and Performance) which is just Performance/(Watts*Space).
Also, does anybody know how much space these supercomputers generally take?
Olorin
Another metric that might be interesting to look at when assessing supercomputers is FLOPS/\$, or FLOPS/\$/MW. Often, when spending lots of money on something, it's useful to know what the return on that investment will be, and if someone can build a supercomputer that gets good performance at a lower cost, they'd have a more compelling product.
plymouth
@ragnarok451 The website for Titan says that it takes up 4,352 sqft of floor space, which is about half of the floorspace of a single floor in Smith hall. I'd imagine that SWaP is a good metric for enterprises looking to purchase servers, but I don't think the people who are building metawatt systems care about the cost of space all that much.
abist
It seems to me that the NVIDIA K20x is particularly very efficient.
A cost that we didn't really address in class is the cost of the space that these machines take up. A metric that Sun introduced to account for this is SWaP (Space, Watts, and Performance) which is just Performance/(Watts*Space).
Check http://www.energystar.gov/ia/products/downloads/Greenhill_Pres.pdf for more details.
Also, does anybody know how much space these supercomputers generally take?
Another metric that might be interesting to look at when assessing supercomputers is FLOPS/\$, or FLOPS/\$/MW. Often, when spending lots of money on something, it's useful to know what the return on that investment will be, and if someone can build a supercomputer that gets good performance at a lower cost, they'd have a more compelling product.
@ragnarok451 The website for Titan says that it takes up 4,352 sqft of floor space, which is about half of the floorspace of a single floor in Smith hall. I'd imagine that SWaP is a good metric for enterprises looking to purchase servers, but I don't think the people who are building metawatt systems care about the cost of space all that much.
It seems to me that the NVIDIA K20x is particularly very efficient.