Dell $38m Supercomputer More Costly than VT's G5s
I got this off Slash Dot. I think it's funny.An anonymous reader writes "According to the Austin Business Journal, Dell's 3-teraflop, 600 server supercomputer cluster cost the University of Texas $38 million. As The Apple Turns has pointed out that this is 7 times the cost (and a quarter of the power) of Apple's cluster at Virginia Tech! "
As the Apple Turns Responded. (I only reprint it in it entirety due to ATAT's refusal to establish permalinks) Get with it people!!!
[NOTE TO SLASHDOTTERS: Please see the disclaimer way downthere at the bottom of the page re: "pure fabrication" and"entertainment" before seeking to inform us that Dell servers, evendual-processor ones, don't cost $60,000 apiece unless you also have topay for an inconveniently large building in which to store them. Thankyou, and welcome!]
Meanwhile, we know that the G5 supercomputeris delivering more pluck per processor than any other supercomputer outthere, but what about bang for the buck? Well, remember how VirginiaTech announced that they went with G5s because they were so much cheaper than Dells? Now we've got something amounting to proof: faithful viewer Pedro Henriquez notes that Michael Dell had yet another one of his psychotic "Gotta Be Steve" episodes recently and had a Dellsupercomputer built at a big university. Surprise, surprise. The onlyproblem is, he didn't copycat the move quite enough to deliver anythingclose to the same degree of raw performance-- or the same cost savings.
According to the Austin Business Journal, about a week ago, the University of Texas took the wraps off of "Lonestar," the "most powerful supercomputer for academic research"-- well, in Texas,anyway. It's nowhere near as big as Virginia Tech's "Big Mac," sinceUT's cluster consists of only "300 computer servers from RoundRock-based Dell Inc." A press releasefrom July notes that each server houses dual Xeon processors (at anunspecified clock speed), so it's a 600-processor cluster, versus the2,200-processor cluster at Virginia Tech. Gee, and we thought theybuilt everything bigger in Texas; clearly we were misinformed.
There's no mention of the cluster's LINPACK score-- we'll have towait for November's standings to know for sure-- but with a theoreticalpeak performance of only 3.67 teraflops, Lonestar would probably onlyrank somewhere between 18th and 30th on last June's list of the top 500 supercomputers.Theoretically, Virginia Tech's cluster is 4.8 times more powerful, andeven when Lonestar bumps up to 1,000 processors by the end of 2004,it'll still lag by nearly a factor of 3. And here's the kicker:Virginia Tech spent $5.2 million on Big Mac; guess how much theDell-based Lonestar is going to cost?
$38 million.
Yup, Lonestar cost over seven times as much as Big Mac, andtheoretically delivers less than a quarter of its performance. So muchfor Dell always winning on price, hmm?
You know that age-old IT maxim that "no one ever got fired forbuying Intel"? That may change now that buying Intel can represent aloss of millions of dollars. By the way, Japan's Earth Simulator,which currently ranks as the fastest supercomputer on the planet, istheoretically 2.3 times as powerful as Big Mac-- but it reportedly costabout $350 millionto build. If G5s had been around last year, the Japanese could've builtthree Big Macs instead for about $15.6 million. Chronological disparity(and the fact that the Earth Simulator doesn't actually use Intelchips) aside, do you suppose whoever greenlit the budget on thatproject is going to get fired for overspending by over a third of abillion dollars? Maybe not, but we bet an end-of-the-year bonus is outof the question...