News Turn That PC Into a Supercomputer

Here's the And Finally from Wired this lunchtime (A lot of interesting stuff on there today!):

A small chip-design firm will unveil a new processor Tuesday it says will transform ordinary desktop PCs and laptops into supercomputers.

At the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, California, startup ClearSpeed Technologies will detail its CS301, a new high-performance, low-power floating-point processor.

The new chip is a parallel processor capable of performing 25 billion floating-point operations per second, or 25 gigaflops.

According to the company, the chip has the potential to bring supercomputer performance to the desktop.

An ordinary desktop PC outfitted with six PCI cards, each containing four of the chips, would perform at about 600 gigaflops (or more than half a teraflop).

At this level of performance, the PC would qualify as one of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

More here

And if you clustered the PCs, like the Apple powered super computer....

 

Beat me to the post.

Anyway this sounds cool.
I need a new tower for the 6 PCI slots.

 

Kewl. Lets see that watercooled and overclocked!!

 

You'd be able to complete an average seti@home workunit in 7 seconds..

 

Sounds amazing ... but will it make it to product status with all that ... I dont think so.

 

nice to play doom3, hl2 and run 7 stances of seti at home, all at same time!!!

 

doesn't the code hafta be recompiled to run on it? and isn't it also running of a pci slot.. It seems it would be more usefull for the college science professor working on an enzyme.. or the pixar guy rendernig a scene then for the average user to play half life and photoshop at the same time

 

Maybe it has software similar to OpenMOSIX, so processors dont have to be recompiled.

Unless it's gonna use PCI-X or something, its gonna be seriously bottelenecked by the PCI bandwidth and there is no way four boards will perform reasonably in one PC unless they are on separate channels.