SC 2005

Had a great time at SC, in between the partying we talked to a lot of the vendors at their booths. Here are the some highlights and observations.

Cluster in a box. The idea is to put a self contained cluster in a desktop or tower case. The best example is Orion which has a 96 node box based around a 12 CPU board. It’s all about the welly/space/power ratio, low power CPUs like the ones from Transmeta mean you can power these things from a normal wall socket and you can put the computer under your desk. Very cool.

The other thing which everyone seemed to be talking about is FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Array), which are microprocessors which can have their logic reprogrammed using software, this means you might be able stick part of your app on the board and a potentially sick speed increase. I attended the OpenFPGA BOF where the ball was set rolling to create a generic library to use with FPGA boards.

All the coolest stuff has Opterons (dual core) a good example is Linux Networx as well as having the best party launched the LS-1 and LS-X machines which are seriously sexy ? 128 dual core Opterons in the baby one and up to 6000 CPUs in the big guy.

The only operating systems I saw on the exhibition floor were Microsoft Windows and RedHat Linux.

The SGI mob were arseholes, I much rather go to the pub with a guy from Microsoft.