MIT's Computer Science department has a new hardware offering...
MIT's computer science department has come up with the ultimate geek computer. it's a 1,000 processor machine called RAMP. The acronym stands for Research Accelerator for Multiple Processors, and it's designed to allow research into multi-processor systems cheaply.
Well, cheap is a relative term you understand. In this case it case it means it 'only' costs between US$100,000 and US$200,000 compared to US$50 million for a machine from SGI or Sun, or even US$3 million for an Intel based Linux machine.
The processor nodes in the RAMP machines are made from FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). They don't run as fast as regular processors, but they can be configured to mimic different processors allowing research into different types of multi-processor machines. So, if you decide to get rid of your Google shares, consider buying a RAMP machine for your next server!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/22/ramp_mit_fix/
Well, cheap is a relative term you understand. In this case it case it means it 'only' costs between US$100,000 and US$200,000 compared to US$50 million for a machine from SGI or Sun, or even US$3 million for an Intel based Linux machine.
The processor nodes in the RAMP machines are made from FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). They don't run as fast as regular processors, but they can be configured to mimic different processors allowing research into different types of multi-processor machines. So, if you decide to get rid of your Google shares, consider buying a RAMP machine for your next server!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/22/ramp_mit_fix/