Re: MISC-d Digest V97 #28
On Thu, 24 Jul 1997, Eugene Leitl wrote:
> Concerning Beowulfs: current Pentium clones can be had for few 10 $,
If we agrre, that www.TheChipMerchant.com sells ar rock bottom prices, the
Cyrix 686 150MHz (200+) is $83, which is is quite a few $10s.
Let us note here, the Intel discontinued the Pentium and slashed prices on
the MMX. The others will heve to follow that sonn, and my feeling is that
the vanila 686-es are selling out of stock.
If we look at something that is going to be around in two ir three months,
we are looking at: K6-166-200-233 @ $181/233/400 ; 686MX-166/200 @
$177/249 ;
Not _exactrly_ a few $10s.
> last
> time I looked MuP21 sold for roughly $40.
This is to cover the development costs out of the sales of development
systems. Do inquire about the price if you want to buy, say 10K MuP21.
> Motherboards cost next to
> nothing,
Say, $150 form an MMX mb. Source -- necxdirect.necx.com:8002
> and the rest of the components (RAM, HD, etc) are also needed for
> F21 nodes.
I haven't heard of a Pentim running off 640K DRAM. I've heard of Pentiums
running off 1M SRAM, though. (I've heard of R10Ks running of 4M SRAM :-)
> L3/L4 microkernel, a message-passing microkernal with Linux
> personality fits in 12 kBytes (i.e. in K6's cache).
What abut the application and the FP code? FP data?
> Beowulf nodes don't
> run X, it is just needed for visualization on one machine.
True.
> There's lots
> of MPI scientific software, which can be ported to Beowulf by just one
> "make".
Do say 'ls -l' at the end to see whether it fits in the primaryc cashe.
In the secondary?
> This code requires good float performance, which F21 can't do.
May be, may be not. But certainly 10xF21 will be better than 1xAMD. And
about 10 time cheaper, I'd add.
> Don't get me wrong, I still go for the F21. But it just doesn't compete
> with the Beowulf, a different type of a beast entirely.
The _only_ advantage of the Beowulf is that you can say 'make' and produce
something running on them. The only.
> (While Beowulfs
> offer one order of magnitude better price/performance ratio as sci
> supercomputers, a SuperDSP box can top that by another order of
> magnitude.
In that regard the SuperDSP box is like the F21 -- porting is required.
> However, beware of the Merced, which will be a C6x clone, and
> run at 0.5-1 GHz).
Vaporware.
--
Penio Penev <Penev@pisa.Rockefeller.edu> 1-212-327-7423
