Asus and NVIDIA unveil ECS 1000 desktop supercomputer

petert (Advanced Forumologist):

If you need to ask the price, then you cannot afford it :-)

Tony23 (New user):

The other thing this would be very exciting for is to use to brute force attack passwords. Time to increase password length and complexity in corporate guidance perhaps?

EggLet (New user):

You do realise the Xbox 360 has 1 Teraflop and the Playstation 3 has 2 Teraflops of computing power? This isn't very ground breaking especially if this is one of the latest, greatest and most expensive commercial computers you can buy considering both consoles have been around for several years now. Even the latest ATI graphics card is meant to be 2 Teraflops I think from memory.

Tony23 (New user):

Quoting EggLet:
You do realise the Xbox 360 has 1 Teraflop and the Playstation 3 has 2 Teraflops of computing power?

No, I didn't realise that. I guess its a wake up call (for me anyway) how far our computing systems have gone. Don't spose you can drop a link where it says what computers systems do what in terraflops or mention a bench mark software to use. I'm curious to see what my system can do and see what that means in a historical context.

Once thing that strikes me as odd though is that I'm now left wondering "what's the point of this system?" I mean, if the advertised system isn't capabile of earth-shattering speeds, what's the point? Is it the scalability of the thing?

EggLet (New user):

The current fastest super computer runs on the same chip technology as the one used in PS3 and it reaches just over 1 Petaflop (peta = 1000 * Tera) but I found this chart http://www.top500.org/lists/2009/06/performance_development interesting as at a guess, because of the logarithmic scale, only about 6-8 years before the PS3 was made the fastest computer was able to reach the same level of flops.

Yeah I'm kinda wondering why they are bragging about the system consider the PS3 is being used as a part of an existing research network called folding@home as well as GPUs and home computers.

I don't know of any software which would be able to test your system as I haven't looked into it and I'm guessing that possibly each test is made by engineers to get the most out of each system so it might be impossible for benchmark software to exist although I'm not sure if that's correct as it is just a guess. Just for your own knowledge a FLOP, the unit of measurement they are using, stands for floating point operations per second which is basically 2562.32434 + 523.3211 over and over again at a guess so if you did some simple programming that could give you a rough idea however it would only be using the CPU not the GPU plus other programs etc will slow the result down so it wouldn't be that accurate, it probably would have to be some propratory machine code which would be able to calculate it but then you would have to be really smart and knowledgable in that sort of thing which I'm not beyond the basics.

Hope that helps.