Personal computing discussed

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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Mon Jun 12, 2017 10:12 pm

whm1974 wrote:
You mean their "trash can" workstation they came out with about four years ago? Yeah I wouldn't buy one either.


I was thinking of the G4, but now that you mention it I think they did say that about the trash can also. The wiki page for "personal supercomputer" to this day still has a picture of a G4 on it.
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Tue Jun 13, 2017 5:32 am

Now I'm thinking of building my own "Personal Supercomputer" on the cheap Using the Ryzen 7 1700 and a couple of Nvidia 1070s. A cluster is out of the question due to lack of space.
 
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Wed Jun 28, 2017 12:49 am

My school had this crazy teacher who had no idea what super computers were. He'd say this: "They were the biggest computers in the first generation, and they would fill up a hall".

I was like, "what the heck is a big computer"? I Kindah think the phrase has remained a mystery to me ever since.

With that said, I don't think we will be needing these any time soon.
 
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Wed Jun 28, 2017 1:07 am

MichaelJD wrote:
My school had this crazy teacher who had no idea what super computers were. He'd say this: "They were the biggest computers in the first generation, and they would fill up a hall".

I was like, "what the heck is a big computer"? I Kindah think the phrase has remained a mystery to me ever since.

With that said, I don't think we will be needing these any time soon.

Yeah I had classes where the teacher knew less then I did about computer hardware. Granted they may know more about the application or programming than I did, but put computer parts in front of them and they wouldn't know what to do.
 
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Wed Jun 28, 2017 6:04 am

That's not a supercomputer, that's just a very beefy workstation. People have been making those for decades (see: SGI).
 
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Wed Jun 28, 2017 11:02 am

NTMBK wrote:
That's not a supercomputer, that's just a very beefy workstation. People have been making those for decades (see: SGI).


Well... Macs used to use PowerPC chips that were also (in a much different configuration) used in Mainframes (and many other IBM products for that matter).

So if you squinted rather a lot, you could consider PowerMacs of that era to be really gimped workstation-level versions of a supercomputer.

EDIT: of course nowadays with cluster-based machines I suppose you could say that about any popular architecture.
 
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Sun Jul 02, 2017 3:45 am

NTMBK wrote:
That's not a supercomputer, that's just a very beefy workstation. People have been making those for decades (see: SGI).


Please tell me this is a practical joke :wink:
 
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Sun Jul 02, 2017 9:03 am

MichaelJD wrote:
NTMBK wrote:
That's not a supercomputer, that's just a very beefy workstation. People have been making those for decades (see: SGI).

Please tell me this is a practical joke :wink:

The term is vague, and once the marketeers got hold of it all bets were off. :lol:

I suppose my own personal rule of thumb is something along the lines of "at least 100x the compute power of a typical desktop system", but that's pretty vague too since "typical" is vague and changes constantly over time.
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Sun Jul 02, 2017 10:11 am

MichaelJD wrote:
NTMBK wrote:
That's not a supercomputer, that's just a very beefy workstation. People have been making those for decades (see: SGI).


Please tell me this is a practical joke :wink:


No joke. Power hungry, super expensive workstations with amazing graphics performance (for their day)? Just look at the SGI Indigo series.
 
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Sun Jul 02, 2017 1:06 pm

Vhalidictes wrote:
NTMBK wrote:
That's not a supercomputer, that's just a very beefy workstation. People have been making those for decades (see: SGI).


Well... Macs used to use PowerPC chips that were also (in a much different configuration) used in Mainframes (and many other IBM products for that matter).

So if you squinted rather a lot, you could consider PowerMacs of that era to be really gimped workstation-level versions of a supercomputer.

EDIT: of course nowadays with cluster-based machines I suppose you could say that about any popular architecture.


Yes, it was a cut down POWER4 with altivec slapped on.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_970

Oh, and a supercomputer using them ranked #3 on top500 list back in the day.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(computing)
 
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Sun Jul 02, 2017 1:13 pm

Scrotos wrote:
Vhalidictes wrote:
NTMBK wrote:
That's not a supercomputer, that's just a very beefy workstation. People have been making those for decades (see: SGI).


Well... Macs used to use PowerPC chips that were also (in a much different configuration) used in Mainframes (and many other IBM products for that matter).

So if you squinted rather a lot, you could consider PowerMacs of that era to be really gimped workstation-level versions of a supercomputer.

EDIT: of course nowadays with cluster-based machines I suppose you could say that about any popular architecture.


Yes, it was a cut down POWER4 with altivec slapped on.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_970

Oh, and a supercomputer using them ranked #3 on top500 list back in the day.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(computing)


It used 1100 of them in a rack. A single workstation, does not count :)
 
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Sun Jul 02, 2017 1:17 pm

NTMBK wrote:
MichaelJD wrote:
NTMBK wrote:
That's not a supercomputer, that's just a very beefy workstation. People have been making those for decades (see: SGI).


Please tell me this is a practical joke :wink:


No joke. Power hungry, super expensive workstations with amazing graphics performance (for their day)? Just look at the SGI Indigo series.


With their wildcat graphics and artsy cases, they were a dream. This is before they started making x86 workstations, mind you. SGI were what you used if you were doing high end 3D movie effects. SGI invented 3D on the computer (what became OpenGL) while PCs were using dumb frame buffers with some acceleration for drawing primatives like lines and solid filled boxes, all 2D of course.

Hell, even amigas could be linked via network for distributed 3D rendering with lightwave (used for effects for early Babylon 5 episodes if memory serves) running a pre-emptive OS while PCs were busy tripping over themselves switching tasks and jacking around with EMS versus XMS.

Loaded Sun workstations were for real engineers who were doing Real Work.

Whatever you think of SGI now, they were a beast back in the day.

And don't even mention the DEC Alpha workstations. You wanted speed, oh sweet momma!
 
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Sun Jul 02, 2017 1:40 pm

NTMBK wrote:
Scrotos wrote:
Vhalidictes wrote:

Well... Macs used to use PowerPC chips that were also (in a much different configuration) used in Mainframes (and many other IBM products for that matter).

So if you squinted rather a lot, you could consider PowerMacs of that era to be really gimped workstation-level versions of a supercomputer.

EDIT: of course nowadays with cluster-based machines I suppose you could say that about any popular architecture.


Yes, it was a cut down POWER4 with altivec slapped on.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_970

Oh, and a supercomputer using them ranked #3 on top500 list back in the day.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(computing)


It used 1100 of them in a rack. A single workstation, does not count :)


Squint harder! :D

Though any x86 chip post AMD64 can be considered the same, going by OP's criteria.

I think the closest you can really come is "this much performance was on the top500 a decade ago" for a single workstation "supercomputer". Not quite the same as what people are talking about, but if you could cram that much power into a workstation, everyone would be doing it.
 
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Mon Jul 03, 2017 3:42 am

Scrotos wrote:
NTMBK wrote:
It used 1100 of them in a rack. A single workstation, does not count :)


Squint harder! :D

Though any x86 chip post AMD64 can be considered the same, going by OP's criteria.

I think the closest you can really come is "this much performance was on the top500 a decade ago" for a single workstation "supercomputer". Not quite the same as what people are talking about, but if you could cram that much power into a workstation, everyone would be doing it.


I see "supercomputer" as a function of form factor, not compute power. Given Moore's Law, any classification based on compute power becomes meaningless very quickly. Do we call this mobile phone in my pocket a supercomputer, because it is inarguably more powerful than old Cray supercomputers? Does this laptop qualify as a desktop, because it blows an old Core 2 Duo system out of the water? Where do you stop? I base the classification on physical size and power consumption.

Sorry if I'm a bit of a stickler about this :) NVidia's tendency to brand literally everything that they make as a "supercomputer" annoys the hell out of me. They even do it with Tegra parts: h

Image

When literally every modern computing device is branded as a "supercomputer", it ceases to be a useful description in any way.
 
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Mon Jul 03, 2017 5:57 am

NTMBK wrote:
I see "supercomputer" as a function of form factor, not compute power. Given Moore's Law, any classification based on compute power becomes meaningless very quickly. Do we call this mobile phone in my pocket a supercomputer, because it is inarguably more powerful than old Cray supercomputers? Does this laptop qualify as a desktop, because it blows an old Core 2 Duo system out of the water? Where do you stop? I base the classification on physical size and power consumption.

That goes too far the other way. Compute power still needs to factor into it somehow; otherwise the device pictured below would arguably qualify as a supercomputer. Physical size, power consumption, and compute power relative to other contemporary systems all need to be criteria.

Front (lots of electro-mechanical relays):
Image

Back (banks of large wire-wound resistors, lots and lots of wires):
Image

Closeup of part of the rack in the foreground of the first pic:
Image

Bonus points to anyone who can identify what the above piece of gear was used for. :wink:

Hint: It was still in daily use up until about 10 years ago, and was in operation when those pics were taken (circa 2005). Based on the amount of heat that was coming off the resistor banks I guesstimate that the power consumption was well into the kilowatts. And no, even when it was new it would not have been considered a "supercomputer".

(Sorry for the low-res photos, I seem to have misplaced the originals and don't have time to go spelunking through old backups right now.)
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Mon Jul 03, 2017 8:35 am

Scrotos wrote:
NTMBK wrote:
MichaelJD wrote:

Please tell me this is a practical joke :wink:

No joke. Power hungry, super expensive workstations with amazing graphics performance (for their day)? Just look at the SGI Indigo series.

With their wildcat graphics and artsy cases, they were a dream. This is before they started making x86 workstations, mind you. SGI were what you used if you were doing high end 3D movie effects. SGI invented 3D on the computer (what became OpenGL) while PCs were using dumb frame buffers with some acceleration for drawing primatives like lines and solid filled boxes, all 2D of course.

Hell, even amigas could be linked via network for distributed 3D rendering with lightwave (used for effects for early Babylon 5 episodes if memory serves) running a pre-emptive OS while PCs were busy tripping over themselves switching tasks and jacking around with EMS versus XMS.

Loaded Sun workstations were for real engineers who were doing Real Work.

Whatever you think of SGI now, they were a beast back in the day.

And don't even mention the DEC Alpha workstations. You wanted speed, oh sweet momma!

The 3Dlabs Wildcat cards are just legendary in my book. Drivers that defined stability. You could throw insanely complex scenes at those cards and they'd work (though slowly) where as the comparable Quadros at the time would crash and burn. They were also ahead of their time in terms of memory management which the rest of the GPU is finally exceeding. Shame that Creative let them die.

Sun hardware was pretty decent back in the day. Software though, there were the early version of Solaris which were pretty rough around the edges.

SGI now doesn't exist. It was bought up by HPE not too long ago for SGI's expertise on Xeon glue chipsets. Those enabled SGI Altix UV to scale up to 256 sockets in a fully coherent fashion. I'm interested in seeing what HPE does with that technology when Sky Lake-EP/EX launches as several of the no-one-will-hit-these-architectural-limits-until-some-one-actually-does has been removed. This scalable glue logic plus 12 Optane DIMMs per socket would permit the system to be just shy of the new 52 bit physical address space on the new chips. That is 3 PB of (slow) addressable memory. Even with the massive speed hit of Optane, I know of a few big data guys who would love such a system as it would remove both the networking overhead and file system overhead in the software layers.

As for DEC Alphas, they were beasts back in the day. Same goes for Tru64 that ran on top of them. Real shame that the platform was intentionally killed off as part of the HP/Compaq merger. While Tru64 didn't survive the merger, OpenVMS did and got a port to Itanium only to effectively be dropped with the death of Itanium. (Yeah, OpenVMS was spun off and working on a x86 port. I'm considering it vaporware until it ships.)
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Mon Jul 03, 2017 2:34 pm

NTMBK wrote:
That's not a supercomputer, that's just a very beefy workstation. People have been making those for decades (see: SGI).


Looking at the picture on the site there, I am imaging they just crossed out Sun and wrote NVidia.
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Mon Jul 03, 2017 2:42 pm

the wrote:
As for DEC Alphas, they were beasts back in the day.

Indeed. Cray even used them for a while.

Trivia: The AMD Athlon's EV6 system bus was a DEC design. "EV6" stands for "Extended VAX, Version 6". Supposedly, Slot A was even electrically compatible with the Alpha CPUs of the day.
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Re: Personal Supercomputer, didn't know there was such a thing.

Mon Jul 03, 2017 2:58 pm

just brew it! wrote:
the wrote:
As for DEC Alphas, they were beasts back in the day.

Indeed. Cray even used them for a while.

Trivia: The AMD Athlon's EV6 system bus was a DEC design. "EV6" stands for "Extended VAX, Version 6". Supposedly, Slot A was even electrically compatible with the Alpha CPUs of the day.

They were. Problem was AMD decided to use Slot A, while DEC/Compaq decided to use Slot B. Same chipsets.

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