Re: What are people paying for when they by a supercomputer?

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Article #356

#356

From: Damon
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 07:54

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In article <1992Nov15.201147.5302@athena.mit.edu> solman@athena.mit.edu (Jason W Solinsky) writes:
>It seems to me that supercomputing power costs about $250,000 per GFLOP
>nowadays. It also seems to me that a company could sell a GFLOP box that
>has enough memory, I/O and internal bandwidth to support near peak
>performance at under $10,000 and have PLENTY of profit margin.
>
>My question is, when people buy supercomputers at $250,000 per GFLOP, what are
>they getting in addition to computational power?

Amongst other things:

Support, libraries, a suitable OS, some apps, CPU cooling plant...

Damon
-- 
Damon Hart-Davis                          Internet: dhd@exnet.co.uk, d@hd.org

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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!dcs.ed.ac.uk!exnet!dhd
From: dhd@exnet.co.uk (Damon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.super
Subject: Re: What are people paying for when they by a supercomputer?
Message-ID: <BxstzC.1G9@exnet.co.uk>
Date: 16 Nov 92 07:54:47 GMT
References: <1992Nov15.201147.5302@athena.mit.edu>
Organization: ExNet Systems Ltd Public Access News, London, UK
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