Building a High-performance Computing Cluster Using FreeBSD (2003)

2003 - 12 years ago

For fun some stupid and simple calculations:

300 CPUs*287 = 86.100 (Passmark Score for the Xeon)

86.100/11981 = 7.2 (Passmark Score for Intel Xeon E5-2660 @ 2.20GHz)

So only _one_ 8-socket 4U rack machine with e.g. 1TB memory and a few SSDs will be faster than this cluster... likely a lot faster because no need for network...

If you look at the energy it's even more clear:

TDP:

300x65W = 19.5kW

8x95W = 0.76kW

25x more energy efficient only considering the CPUs while having the same or better speed. Crazy.

If you take into account everything else it's likely an even wider gap:

150machinesx300W = 40kW (considering DDR1/DDR2 FB ECC RAM is energy hungry)

1machinex1200W = 1.2kW

So... so the same power even faster at 1/33 of the energy consumption.. in 10 years. Crazy.

If you choose better CPUs e.g. 12cores it's even better.. at least in theory...