[geeks] the biggest, baddest workstation...

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 07:16:19PM -0400, Jonathan J. M. Katz wrote:
> What's the biggest, baddest workstation one can build these days?
> 
> I figure 16 cores (4x4) in some shade of Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron. Who
> sells 'em?

You think too low.  With AMD, you can do definately do 32 cores (8x4).
They are promising 48 or even 96 cores by later this year (June I guess
for the 6 core chip).

With intel, I believe you can now do 24 cores (+ hyperthreading).

SuperMicro and BOXX are at least two of the companies that sell that
stuff.  I think Tyan does as well.

I like the idea of rackmounted workstations personally.  For one thing,
if you are talking real workstations, would you rather have them in a
controlled machine room used by a fiber optic DVI/USB extender?

Then, next to the rackmounted workstation, you would attach a NVidia
Quadro Plex 2200 S4 graphics unit, and one or more Nvidia Tesla S1070
compute accelerators.

Also, you would insert 2 (or more) quad 4Gb FC cards attached to 2 dual
port FC arrays per card, stuffed full of at least 48 1TB SATA drives.
This would be one place to save money if you could reduce the size of
the disks without reducing overall disk performance.

So far we've been talking relatively reasonbly priced.  If you budget is
suitably studly, you could use a Sony SRX-T105 for your display (there
is a T110, but it (about $40k more and probably too bright for office
use anyway).