http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2008/sep/16/windows.microsoftThe Cray CX1 is billed as an affordable deskside supercomputer, with prices starting at $25,000 on Amazon
On the Windows Server Division blog, Tina Crouch has announced a cheap Cray CX1 supercomputer running Windows HPC Server 2008, the "high performance computing" version of Windows Server. She says:
How can you get one?! It's as easy as shopping on Amazon.com. Customers can go online, order the CX1 system using a configurator and pay with credit card. If that's not making supercomputing mainstream, I don't know what is.
The CX1 is basically a blade server that can take up to 8 blades, each with one or two Intel Xeon processors. For extra power, you can link up to three CX1s together.
Most supercomputing is done with Unix or Linux, of course, and the CX1 isn't intended to compete in the "proper" supercomputer market. Instead, it's aimed at the tiny (but potentially large) market for deskside supercomputing, where the users already know how to use Windows but don't have a clue about Linux. This is probably around 99% of business users, and the majority of academic users.
This is the first Cray to use Intel chips, and according to Cray's press release:
"Cray's CX1 system will bring many HPC capabilities to the office that were previously confined to the datacenter, enabling more users to employ supercomputing to help them solve some of their most difficult computational problems," said Richard Dracott, Intel's General Manager of High Performance Computing, "In addition, we continue to collaborate with Cray on developing the supercomputing technologies of the future, aimed at all segments of the HPC market."
An additional benefit for Microsoft is that by investing in the HPC version of Windows, it's able to develop and test features that can be fed back into the mainstream Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, which are based on the same code.
The latest HPC version of Windows is being officially announced in New York on September 22 at the 2008 High Performance on Wall Street conference where they need high-speed results. Maybe there's still time to knock out a "How much less will my derivates and sub-prime mortgages be worth in the next 60 seconds?" application.
