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back to article Cray stuffs 46 mobile Intel chips into microserver

The Custom Engineering unit of supercomputer maker Cray and the bespoke ruggedized, military-grade system maker Extreme Engineering Solutions (X-ES) have joined forces to prototype a super-dense microserver based on Intel's mobile Core i7 processors. Last week, X-ES announced that it had won the contract to develop and …

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  1. Disco-Legend-Zeke
    Pint

    I Don't See Any...

    ...space for the waterfall.

    0 0
  2. Hud Dunlap
    Big Brother

    Unknown customer

    Cray is the one actually selling the box to an unnamed customer???

    Try the U.S. government.

    http://www.fastcompany.com/1759428/unpacking-the-tech-of-the-secret-internet-in-a-suitcase

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    not like a data center on a board

    ...but other than trace logistics, is there a reason not to have hot aisle/cold aisle design on motherboards, like rows in a data center?

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  4. Christian Berger

    Electrolythic capacitor

    Is that an Electrolythic capacitor blocking the airstream on the heatsink?

    Such capacitors don't like heat. Even 60 degrees celsius makes them age faster than 40 degrees, so it's in general a good idea to put it away from the heatsink.

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    I can't see any

    Blinkenlights either...

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  6. Magnus_Pym

    ruggedised, small, secret?

    Obviously military. It looks small enough to fit into back pack. Perhaps, after all the 'hacking' scandals, this the kind of heavy iron needed to encrypt/decrypt millitay radio traffic in the field. Perhaps it is part of the new 'networked soldier' strategy where every man in the field will have his own website and micro-blog.

    Just got to develop personal fusion generators to power the things.

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    1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      RE: ruggedised, small, secret?

      Nah. The soldier wouldn't have any room left in his backpack for the 1300W PSU, and he'd have to lug one heck of a lot of cable around to use it in the field.

      I'm guessing this is M$'s next gen cloud service server, and I think they are simply doing their own design much in the way Google do their own "baking tray" servers. Any "military" users are more likely to be people like the NSA or CIA, which need lots of grunt for large front-end server farms used for churning through the immense databases they have, and for real-time analysis of vid feeds and telecoms the World over.

      Interesting to see they went for mobile chips, I was expecting maybe an Atom-based design with even greater density and low power.

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    smut hose

    that's a lot of porn, very quickly

    "military-grade" - I'll say

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  8. rav
    Thumb Up

    yeah but....

    can you get it it with Windows XP?

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  9. GCom

    Couple of design issues to note

    Couple of things strike me about this board

    A) Core i7 doesn't have ECC controller in the cpu package so presumably they are using a custom chip set which adds ECC support but no doubt reduces memory throughput being outside the die

    B) Why havnt the staggered the boards to minimize heat shadowing, probably says something about the intended form factor

    All in all has the hallmarks of a one off run and cray wished to get some PR out of the extreme engineering

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    1. GCom
      Reply Icon

      Correction

      Correction to point

      A) They are most probably using a Xeon chip set (3450 likely candidate) which implements ECC on the QPI channels

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  10. stu 4
    Gimp

    osx lion

    hackintosh grand central dispatch ultimate test there - lets see what FCP X can really do....

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