Gadgets: Cray CX1 a personal supercomputer
By Jay Garrett
It's not every day that you are able to think to yourself, "you know what, I really fancy buying myself a Cray Supercomputer" and just go out and do it.
Well now you have that very chance.
Let me just throw some history at you: If you're not familiar with the Cray brand their first customer bought theirs in July '77, paying US$8.86 million (but that was including the $1 million for the disks) for the pleasure.
So, back to the now: Cray seems to want to go one better than the One Laptop Per Child OLPC idea and get everyone to join in their One Supercomputer Per Home quest.
The CX1 is a quite substantial leap from Cray's prior offerings: It's the company's first attempt at a "personal supercomputer" or, if you prefer a "mini-supercomputer".
The Cray CX1 Supercomputer comes loaded with Windows HPC Server 2008 and incorporates up to 8 nodes and 16 Intel Xeon CPUs (dual or quad-core); additionally, it boasts up to 4TB of internal storage, 64GB of memory per node and also plays nicely with Linux.
The CX1 is said to be the most affordable supercomputer offered by Cray (not to mention the “world’s highest-performing computer that uses standard office power”).
This all sounds rather fantastic until you see the price tag fluttering between $25,000 to well over $60,000 – but at least it's available now and it's darn site cheaper than the $8,000,000 Grandad Cray.
But saying that, it's still a lot just to check your Facebook updates and arrange a pub-night over Messenger!
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Jay Garrett is a a professional bass player and gadget junkie. Check out his blog at idleparis.co.uk
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That looks like a beast of a machine. Now I just need to get $25,000.
Look under the sofa cusions.........that's where I find my loose change :0P