[geeks] Inventories and Wish Lists (again)

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 07:35:11PM +0100, Chris Byrne wrote:
> Not if you're Dave McGuire ;-) I think between him and one or two of the
> other guys there's your full list.
> 
> Honestly that's not all that expensive a list minus the Octane 2. If you
> stuck to a dual Octane MXE I'm guessing you could do it all for under 30
> grand. Though why would you want J90's? Cuz they're relatively cheap these
> days?

For the simulation stuff I want, vectorizing is easier than distribution over
wide numbers of CPUs.  Obviously it has to distribute a little to be split
over the 32 processors that 2 ideal j90s would have.

I think the rack of Suns would alone blow the 30 grand mark, but perhaps I'm
wrong.  Software for the rack of suns alone would blow 30 grand.  Although
for 30 grand, I might be able to pay someone to beef up an existing raytracer
to my needs.  If one were to add some front end and back end processing to
Povray+povman patch, then everything I want could probably done in Povray,
but it would be exceptionally slow since it would essential be rendering every
frame something like 100 times, while also subjecting it to tremendous geometry
loads.  The only other free choice would be a rack of lintel boxes running
BMRT though.

Anyway, but I'm drifting.  If it was just SS10s or lots of 4/600s, running
a free renderer, the rack probably wouldn't be too costly.  Still there are
other cost problem areas, like OS and dev tools for the Crays.

And where the heck are you going to find an adequate SAN setup for that kinda 
money?

Anyway, back to work, so that I can continue working towards the dream
setup.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd