There is a lot more to supercomputers than just core count, but that is an easy mistake to make and even people in supercomputing are prone to making that mistake. Yes it takes many cores(and not all cores are created equal, a 2 core Intel Atom running at 1.5GHz is easily beat by a Intel Core 2 Duo running at 1.5GHz) but you also need storage, interconnect and RAM. You need the bandwidth to connect the cores to the RAM and to the storage. RAM is obvious I think. Storage on the other hand many people forget about but it is just as important, remember that you will need to feed your processors the data to work on and it will most likely come from storage. And it will go back to storage post-processing so your storage will need to be fast enough to stream it back on while at the same time reading the work to be done still! On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 10:35 AM, Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, 23 Jul 2013, Ryan Coleman wrote: > >> I think the only thing "super" about this is the marketing ploy getting >> people to buy them. :) > > > > I thought the superness derived from the idea that one could put many > together, fairly inexpensively, and get a lot of cores for low cost: > > http://adapteva.myshopify.com/collections/parallella/products/parallella-cluster-kit > > If you run a real supercomputer, you will pay a *lot* for power, but this > little bugger can't be using all that much. > > For my work I have been using real supercomputers and need a few gigs of RAM > per core, but I could probably figure out ways to get the work done by > writing my own C programs to process the data with much less RAM per core. > If I were doing that, I can see how this little thing might work for me. > > Mike > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list