Tyan Typhoon stuffs 16 cores into "desktop" "supercomputer"

Soon you may able to get the power of a supercomputer in a convenient little box, and without resorting to daisy-chained Macs or quantum trickery. Tyan was showing off a desktop-ish sized box at CeBIT,called the Typhoon, that can hold as many as four blade servers of the Opteron or Pentium varieties, with a maxed-out configuration of 4 blades x 2 sockets per blade x 2 cores per chip = 16 cores possible in one enclosure. These so-called Personal Super Computers, or PSCs, can handle up to 64GB (the B2881YDS4T Opteron) or 32GB (the B5160YDS4T Pentium 4) of RAM, sport one SATA hard drive per blade, and address heat and noise issues with a rack full of quiet-running fans. Quibbles with the configuration seem minor, such as the lack of integrated KVM support for direct keyboard/video/mouse access to the individual servers, if necessary, and the use of Gigabit Ethernet interconnects. So far we've heard nothing regarding price, availability, or whether it can play Doom. Keep reading to catch a view from the back...

[dcman @ Mar 13th 2006 7:09PM]

And why does the label say "Dual-core ready" again?

This looks like it'll be extremely noisy and heat-generating. Oh well, I suppose for that kind of power, that's not such a big deal...

[Justin @ Mar 13th 2006 7:21PM]

Wow! That looks like it would be a very noisey heater!

[Samuel McConnell @ Mar 13th 2006 7:22PM]

Yes, but does it run Linux?

[bd @ Mar 13th 2006 7:23PM]

I think all "desktop-ish" computers should come with wheels.

[Hexar @ Mar 13th 2006 7:24PM]

I've been looking for a device that'll allow me to surf the web, run Fligh Simulator at 120fps, play winamp at 10ms, generate enough heat to replace my furnace and ...wait for it........play Doom.

[l33tch @ Mar 13th 2006 7:29PM]

I don't know how QUIET this super PC is, but if I were ever to get one, I'll be sure to put in the basement and run wires up to the monitor upstairs. Unless of course, I get a UWB monitor and keyboard and mouse, and flash drive reader and DVD drive.

[Marc Ferro @ Mar 13th 2006 7:30PM]

I dunno what's with all the bashing...

I find this machine very interesting...

[andy @ Mar 13th 2006 7:35PM]

with all the fans on the back of this i hope then wheels have breaks. never mond the processing power, what speed have they clocked this travelling at?

[Mat @ Mar 13th 2006 7:38PM]

Wow, this thing is pretty much a monster. I think i want one...

[jeff @ Mar 13th 2006 7:46PM]

at last a way to make it on the seti@home top ten list

[AutoDas @ Mar 13th 2006 7:46PM]

Can any professional 3D modeler say if this is what a "render farm" is? Better or worse than what's out there? (

[Vision77 @ Mar 13th 2006 7:51PM]

What are we going to do tonight Brain?
The same thing we do every night Pinky...Try to take over the world! Sorry, but they might just succeed with that damn thing!!!

[Cliff @ Mar 13th 2006 7:51PM]

My guess is that it would be a steady gentle whirring. Especially if the fans used are long-lasting ball-bearing fans that run at low rpms... Obviously, there would be heat issues not to mention expensive power bills. Looks nice!

[aparaty cyfrowe @ Mar 13th 2006 8:03PM]

looks like real big toster ;).

[twrex10 @ Mar 13th 2006 8:04PM]

Great! I was trying to think of the ultimate computer setup for when I become rich the other day... this very well may satisfy that need.

[bd @ Mar 13th 2006 8:12PM]

Do you think if they put the fans on the bottom, I could wheel this thing around and mow my lawn?

[Deluxe @ Mar 13th 2006 8:16PM]

bd, if they put the fans on the bottom it could hover around and deliver beverages to you pool-side.

[Mike @ Mar 13th 2006 8:16PM]

I've read about a company called Rocketcalc http://rocketcalc.com/ about 4 years ago. They make machines exactly like this. So this is nothing new to me.

[Lance @ Mar 13th 2006 8:20PM]

Why don't you just do what I did, and build a server room (closet with exhaust fan). Put a rack in there, and run KVM out to nice clean desk and LCD.

[gilly @ Mar 13th 2006 8:27PM]

actually its soposed to be quiet
heres another article

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30258

sorry about spelling

[Bill Gates @ Mar 13th 2006 9:17PM]

This is BOGUS.

Its not a 16core system. Its 4 "individual" 4 core systems.

Its the same thing as having 4 different servers each with 2 dual-core processors in them. They just happen to be blades that shared the same power etc in a nice rack chassis.


Big Whoop.


Call me when you ACTUALLY have 16 real processors in one system like a Sun or HPUX, or AIX box then I might be impressed.

[futurepastnow @ Mar 13th 2006 9:38PM]

If anyone is wondering how well this thing can play games, stop now.

This box is meant to be controlled over a network (i.e, with no monitor, keyboard, or mouse attached to it) to do math really, really fast. It's four blade servers in a box, with ultraquiet fans so you can tolerate being in the same room with it.

[Bruce @ Mar 13th 2006 10:39PM]

#20 Would you settle for 8 dual-core Opterons?

http://www.gigaserver.nl/product_info.php?products_id=179

Only 9999 EUR (base price I assume)

Or this one (same chassis) : http://www.swt.com/vx50.html

Only 65,000 with 8 Dual-core 880's and 128GB of ram and the most expensive options (except for tape dirves I could fine)

I wonder how Quake would do on this?

[Rick C @ Mar 13th 2006 11:30PM]

You guys are being too hard, hang a baking rack off the front and you could work and smell the smell of baking bread at the same time.

[play free games @ Mar 14th 2006 1:44AM]

Yeah this is powerful, and kind of cool looking, but this is meant to get servers out of the datacenter rackspace and into a smaller, more portable setup that is self contained. It's a nice idea, especially with the attention towards cooling and noise.

[Melissa E Lane @ Mar 14th 2006 1:44AM]

If everyone is going to complain about something then the least they can do is check their spelling!

[Gill Bates @ Mar 14th 2006 3:53AM]

You insolent fools, 16 CPU's is not enough. Everyone will have these in 5-10 years, we need more cowbell, er power.

What would be even cooler is if an entire community was able to share the Idle CPU power they already have, but don't use. That could be in the range of 1,000's of CPU doing simple calculations. I'm sure Intel, AMD and even Microsoft wouldn't want this to happen.

[Maurice Avery @ Mar 14th 2006 5:01AM]

Well.... several people think this would be great for game playing. No. It's not designed for that. The only use for games it would be possably usefull for would be as a server for multi-player games.

However! As a render farm this would be real handy.

I do a lot of rendering in TrueSpace 7, Bryce 5.5, Poser and a few other specialized 3D apps. I have a single frame scene that took 2 and 1/2 weeks to render about 7 or 8 years ago on my Pentium 1 that had only 512MB of RAM and lot's of HD space for the erra. The same scene takes under 10 seconds on my current system. A P4 2.8GHz Dual Core, 2GB RAM and 2 200GB IDE HD's. Now on this current system I did the same thing again and built a scene that has a couple of billion vertex's, turned on ray tracing to 8.5x, atmouspheric effects, tons of reflective surfaces, transparent surfaces etc. etc. etc. and tried to render a still frame at something like 48,000 x 32,000 pixels (don't remember the exact figgures) intending to print it as a HUGE poster on the 1200dpi 8ft wide poster printer a former employer lets me use at cost for materials. I was trying to match the render to the actual pixels the printer can produce at 1200dpi. So to make a long story longer..... even with the updated tech it still took my system a week to render a single frame still image. Yikes. Well fortunatly with the dual core CPU I was able to open task manager and set affinity to one CPU and priority to normal when I wanted to use the system for anything else and then set it back to affinity to both CPU's and priority as high as it goes. Watching the progress percentage of the render and watching performance in task manager I could see that even going to a single CPU with Dual Core made a huge differance not only in renering time but in usability for other tasks durring that time.

So I can see having a box like this with 16 cores (even if each blade acts as a seperate server) would be of great benifit to anyone who does 3D rendering or uses any math intensive application that has multi-CPU, network farming or distributive capabilitys. I know it's wishfull thinking but I sure hope when the price is anounce that it's let's say... in the $3,000 or less range?? Please! ;->

[Sean @ Mar 14th 2006 7:34AM]

$3000 or less?? hahhahahahahaahahahahahahahahaha etc. No it will cost at least 3 times that, unless it comes empty.

[Jared Schwager @ Mar 14th 2006 8:06AM]

Geez. Talk about one noisy computer. There's got to be at least ten fans in that thing.

[E @ Mar 14th 2006 8:37AM]

"10. Can any professional 3D modeler say if this is what a "render farm" is? Better or worse than what's out there?"

Yes this could be used as a 3D render farm. Dunno if this is better, the size factor is nice, but unless they make it cheaper than having a rack of equivilent blade servers, then it's really a stupid idea.

No one would buy it.

It's a great idea, no real reason to have a huge rack of machines. This would be perfect for people like me who need multiple CPUs for rendering (I freelance) but don't have lots of extra space.

It could also be used for compositing with After Effects, Digital Fusion or any other compositing app.

Essentially all a render farm is, is a cluster of computers linked with software that distributes either whole frames to process, or in some cases, parts of a frame. So you could have more than one computer assembling one image at a time.

Who cares if it has KVM support! VNC has been around for ages.

[E @ Mar 14th 2006 8:46AM]

As it is now, dual core machine appropriate for 3D rendering run in the $4,000-$6,000 range.

I would expect a moderately configured system 4 blades, each with at least 2 Gig RAM, several hundred Gig of HD space to cost in the neighborhood of $12,000-$15,000 if they even want to try and compete with a seperate blade system setup.

And that's cheap for dual cores. Probably will be more like $20,000+ at least, because business people are asshats.

[James @ Mar 14th 2006 9:15AM]

Yeah, but can it handle SLi?

[Powdered Toast Man @ Mar 14th 2006 9:36AM]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...

[Guillaume @ Mar 14th 2006 2:28PM]

16 core that's not that much, Orion multisystems is (was ?) delivering a "cluster in a box" workstation with up to 96 processors ...

http://www.orionmulti.com/products/specs_ds96
(the site doesn't seem to be available)

[kevin @ Mar 14th 2006 4:35PM]

Xi Computer already does 16 cores and offers up to 64 GB of ram. here's a link to see:
http://www.xicomputer.com/products/mtoweropmp.asp

[georgezilla @ Jul 6th 2007 12:37AM]

It is easy to see that few here have any experiance with clusters or clustering. There should be no reason that it could not run Linux. Rocks Cluster Linux or openMosix should do just fine. And YES it could play DOOM. In fact several games at the same time. And give you graphic frame rates that would bolw your minds. And at aprox $10K USD, the price really is'nt that bad.

Try this on this url for size ...

http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/articles/video/0,1000002009,39287794,00.htm

Then come back and let's have an informed discussion.