Super Micro stuffs super node into pizza box

Motherboard and whitebox system maker Super Micro is talking up its products at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany this week, including a hybrid Xeon-GPU cluster node, blade servers sporting the new six-core "Istanbul" Opterons, and a baby super workstation. Perhaps the most interesting machine …

[John Smith 19]

But are those demos being re-calc'd in real time?

With offline processing writing to a (big) file any modern system would be powerful enough. If you want to make 1 change a day and leave it to re-calc over night.

But for twiddling (even controlled parameter twiddling with a method-of-experiments plan) something a lot faster is needed.

So where those demo's being done on the fly?

Otherwise just what the Interception Modernisation Programme needs. Now all they need is some of that magic find-all-suspects-with-a-matching-comms-pattern software GCHQ seem so keen on.

How hard could that be?

[Anonymous Coward]

First to comment

Isn't it funny when the first comment is done by someone clearly not knowing what they're talking about? Makes the whole article seem cleverer than it is!

[Matt Bryant]

Nice but....

<looks for the "Obligatory will-it-run-Crysis" icon.....>

I like the PCI-e way of connecting these GPU-CPU combos as it's a common standard and so will be easy to speed adoption across vendors . That means we might even be able to mix-and-match bits from different vendors to get the most suitable bundle for a given requirement. Whilst I'm sure there are more "elegant" solutions coming, they'll probably be proprietary and mean vendor lock-in.

[Graham Marsden]

"Hello, Pizza Shed...?"

"Yeah, hi, can I get a quattro formaggio, a SuperServer 6016GT-TF-TM2 and a side order of garlic bread, thanks..."

[WhatWasThat?]

Standard Interfaces

I also like the idea of using standard PCI-E interconnects for adding on GPU daughterboards. Odd though, I used to think of them as "graphics cards"... Hmmm...

Of course, having anything that would conform allows for upgrading along the curve, as well as substituting "lesser" boards for on-the-cheap(?!) release versions for the masses (hopefully?).