Server just arrived. It is rather bad ass looking.
- jim 11-09-2005 9:42 pm


- mark 11-09-2005 10:09 pm


Well, okay, everything's relative.

That's real isn't it? I mean the circular one. I'm pretty sure I've seen that before (Connection Machine?) Or maybe I'm just remembering my Star Trek.

What? What? What did you say? Sorry I can't hear you I have a jet airplane idling in my apartment.

Holy cow. I was wondering how they kept all that stuff cool. The fans are insane!

root@localhost # df

/dev/sda3 362051032
/dev/sda1 75904
/dev/sdb1 364850320
/dev/sdc1 1824661884

:-)
- jim 11-10-2005 3:52 am


That's a Cray 2. I saw one once at the University of Minnesota in about 1986. It's liquid cooled (florinert). That crescent-shaped chassis holds all the electronics, and is filled with liquid. The blue columns in the rear are the cooling towers for the coolant. The two towers on the left and right are power supplies, if I remember right.

Oh, yeah, I might have thought to mention the fans. High powered computers these days consume vast amounts of power. Some AMD CPUs are 90 watts. Intel is worse. It's the limiting factor in performance of systems these days.

Liquid cooling might start to look attractive.
- mark 11-10-2005 6:44 am


By the way, it would be interesting to compare your new machine to that 20 year old super computer. Advances have been made. From 97 to 2004, x86 processors got 65 times faster for video processing. That's a lot.
- mark 11-10-2005 6:46 am


"Advances have been made. From 97 to 2004, x86 processors got 65 times faster...."

It's really crazy how fast it has happened. Processor speed for sure, but how about storage? Just saw this page yesterday: Historical notes about the cost of hard drive storage space.
- jim 11-12-2005 6:56 pm


Also, as long as we're on this topic, how about this picture of a 500 KB hard drive from 1975. LOL. Great story beneath the photo.


- jim 11-12-2005 7:01 pm


The results I cited came from a "The Mother of All CPU Charts" at Tom's Hardware Guide. It's a detailed overview of the past few years of x86 processor advances. Part I Part II
- mark 11-12-2005 8:49 pm


The new server ash.datamantic.com should now be reachable here in the apartment (unless RoadRunner gives me a different IP but they don't seem to do that which is a very cool thing.)
- jim 11-13-2005 2:18 am


It's down now ("The system is going down for system halt NOW!" - I love that message.) I can't sleep with those fans.
- jim 11-13-2005 4:05 am


That new datamantic server is amazing. I stand in awe.
- tom moody 11-13-2005 7:34 am





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