Re: Check the numbers - VTech cost is going up
Originally posted by AidenShaw
It's hard to meaningfully compare the costs of the VTech cluster against the others.
The VTech $5.2M figure doesn't include facilities, air-conditioning, power, installation, staffing, ....
The Earth Simulator figure includes the building and seismic reinforcements.
The 10x savings number rapidly drops when comparable methods for calculating the expenses are used!
Unlike you, I know something called "Fermi" estimation. The $5.2 M figure included the cost of the networking and cabling which in Q&A was determined to be $1.5 million putting the cost at $3.7 million which is the educational price + 2GB RAM (no discounts). This is significantly below the $9-10 million quoted price for the Itanium systems by a factor of 2-3.
Now add in the cost of the facilities upgrade and air conditioning ($2 million according to the presentation), chuck in a couple of million for the building and you'll see a more than 10x price differential estimation vs. the $150 million (estimated) #2 or $300 million (estimated) #3. If anything, it's probably greater than 10x (of course, it's a bit unfair here because I it is impossible for Terascale to be #1 and it's highly unlikely it will beat #2).
I seem to remember the new #4 cluster weighs in the at $30-60 million (i.e. Terascale only offers a 2-3x cost savings, I figure it is closer to 2x due to the chips and 3x because they used Infiniband).
A good point to emphasize - the VTech cluster is the first large scale InfiniBand fabric cluster on the list. The Itanium, Xeon and Alpha clusters are using less capable fabrics.
I'll take exception to the wording "less capable." I believe the fabrics are just as capable, just not close to affordable for a university. $1.5 million for cards, routers and cabling: that's truly bargain basement. (Thanks, Intel!)
However the general idea of your statment bears repeating 100x over because I believe this is why the rush occurred which forced them to by G5 systems instead of wait until the 4-way 970's start shipping from IBM in 1Q 2004. Still the 970 is the clear winner on price/performance as by it's 2x cheaper quoted price even with such useless parts as a superdrive, graphics card, optical in/out, usb 2, firewire....
BTW, it's somewhat less than 50% better than the Itanium (the Rpeak is 50% greater because they have the same flops/clock but the best Itanium clocks in at 1.5Ghz. Note though that the Itanium is more efficient in other parts so I add the qualification... comparing to the #4 cluster it seems it's between 25-50% better) and it's 100% better than the Opteron (same Mhz ratting but half the flops/clock). This is my rationalization of the above statement. I don't know the costs but they're all in the same price range in my little "rough estimation" book of "same process = same costs".
And wait for IBM BladeCenter systems with IB and the PPC970 - you could put 2200 PPC970 CPUs in a standard 10ft x 10ft (100 sq ft) cubicle !! Compare that to the 3000 sq ft VTech cluster....
I don't think these will be able to be switched using infiniband (yet). But there are 4 ways coming down the pike that are in standard rackmount configs.
Personally, I can't wait for the 970 blades. We have a number of empty slots in our BladeCenter at work.
