Orion Multisystems is working hard to bring clustering technology to workstations, in an effort to bring supercomputing like performance to the home user - something that will almost certainly be necessary with the software of tomorrow.

The company is offering clusters comprising 12 and 96 nodes in a desktop form factor - making possible performance levels of up to 300 GFlops. A computer system that would just about make it into the "Top 500" probably has about three times that. So you can quickly see just how much power we are potentially talking about.

"The 96-node system uses eight boards with twelve nodes each. The boards are connected via a 10gigE switch chip (10 Gbit uplink); the bandwidth between nodes is one Gbit. The processors in the design announced are Transmeta's Efficeon processors (90 nm) which will use clock speeds from 1.5 GHz to 1.6 GHz."

Just look at this picture:



That thing looks amazing.

Still, you are probably going to need one to play Quake 5 and run Blackcomb anyway...

Yeah, amazing hammer

But do these folks think about power consumption at all?

Well, surely it runs off of a common PSU -surely? I've not looked at the specs but I guess it must. Its meant to be a normal household appliance, is it not?


If I read the http://www.top500.org/ website correctly, then the systems down at like level 500 don't look that much tougher - maybe they are 4 times bigger in terms of nodes, yeah, but they are along the same continuum make no mistake.

I expect this sort of thing, albeit in a much more compact fashion, will be the norm in about 10 years. Who knows... maybe less.

The 96 CPU cluster is supposed to use 1500W - less than your average water kettle. And yes, they plug into your normal wall outlet.