“Every so often there comes a genre-bending product, and Tyan has one of those on its stand at CeBIT this year. It is called the Typhoon PSC or Person Super Computer, and is aimed at the scientific and HPC set. Typhoon PSCs come either Opteron or P4/PD flavors, and brushed aluminium or black finish. The point of this box is not to make an ultimate gaming rig, it is meant to take what used to be the domain of a data centre and move it to under the desktop.” That’s 4 dual-socket blades (either P-IV or Opteron) in a stylish case with wheels and handles. Now that’s one machine I’d like to play Solitare on.
Guess it’s in the eye of the beholder…
now if we could get a single power connector (4 of them? come on!) and like the article said, a kvm switch (alltho running the right software can take care of that. these days you can run windows on one, linux on another and drag the mouse from one desktop to the next in a instant).
the need for low latency depends on the task tho. some dont require much cross-talk, but others do so at an allmost insane rate…
overall its a cute product, and will be even more interesting if its simple to bunch them together
this is the perfect solution for home entertainment systems. have one take care of the encoding, one the decoding and the rest the general workload
need more horsepower, add another “blade”.
here’s the link from the tyan homepage for the opteron model
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/typhoon_b2881.html
and the specs:
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/typhoon_b2881_spec.html
I’m curious as to what the pricing is going to be. If they can keep it affordable this could be a great alternative to your typical grey-box cluster, especially in terms of space.
I want the 16 core opteron version of this to install osx86 on.
Gotta make sure iTunes has enough power after all.
If they want to convince people that this air cooled machine is (relatively) quiet, perhaps “Typhoon” isn’t the best name.
That baby just cries out for liquid cooling.
tyan makes some of the best opteron system boards, and decent rack mount servers. but this design is non-innovative
-the close grouping of the boards allows for faster interconnects than gigE (such as pathscale). why not take advantage of this? this box is just 4 boards networked together with gigE. nothing special.
-why only 4×2 cpus? why not 4×4 cpus for a total of 32 cores? tyan already sells 4x and 8x cpu boards.
-stacking 4 ots power supplies together seems primitive. a single integrated psu could have been more efficient, used fewer fans, and made the system quieter.
-the chassis visual design is not amazing and does not look rackable or modular. the first thing a user will need is to attach a storage array.
Mieses: First of all, I think the fact that TYAN is trying to break into a new market, is reason enough as to why they are going for lower hardware specs. Normal blades cost somewhere around 3k and the cost of the chassis is much higher if there is a unified power supply, as that is the main factor that increases reliability and such.
I see a couple of good uses for it. It probably would be possible to install some clustering software on this, and choose how much performance you want to allocate for each OS. Let’s say you use windows and linux and you do most of your CPU demanding stuff in linux, then you can use two blades for linux and one for windows. The clustering s/w sits on one of them, so it might or might not be able to use the performance of that system.
It would be nice to throw one of these in the basement, and have thin clients all around the house.
Sphinx: I don’t blades require liquid cooling and i doubt that there will be enough space in that chassis to put tubes and coolers in. Most of the time, blades are fine just by air cooling. They are built for that.
As the article says, this is opening up a new market for the next generation of personal supercomputers. It’s a good start in my opinion.