A Redundantly Powerful Computer Theory

Well, the title's slightly misleading. This isn't a theory on a computer so powerful it will rise up and eat our tasty human organs. Although, now that I think about it, that would be really cool. Whatever.

I don't claim to know everything, only to know little bits and pieces of some things, so forgive me if anything I say sounds ignorant.

I want to build a computer so redundantly powerful as to not suffer any slowdowns, lag or indiscreations with software and to prevent having to upgrade with the constantly changing computer world. This is how it works:

What is the most state of the art, top end program out there? I.E., what requires the most powerful computer on the market in terms of RAM, processor speed, video card (and its RAM), et cetera. Take those specs, and multiply them by four, and multiply the product by four, and your have the specs of this computer.

As I stated earlier, I'm not exactly in the know when it comes to computer hardware. I'm already sure the cost of this computer is going to be insane, but, it this even possible? And in terms of hardware, what do you recommend?

Sure, you can always run a computer on 4 processors, 4 256 mb (or 4 512 mb) video cards, 10 ram cards, and 10x every other piece of hardware. You'll just need a huge and powerful fan in the computer, enough money to buy a car, a generator to supply the wattage your computer will need, and the knowledge that your computer is going to be one big space-heater.

Oh I'm sure it's possible, if you want a massively parallel supercomputer. It would cost anywhere from $10000 to a million dollars, by my estimation. And it won't last forever. Eventually technology will catch up and exceed your supercomputer. When I was in college, the 800 MHz "supercomputer" in the OSU physics lab was amazing. Now it takes at least 3 GHz to really knock anybody's socks off, and it takes multiple processors running at that speed as well :P

So then you admit it's possible? Sweet. Then that brings about the second question: what kinds of hardware do you guys recommened?

I can do without a car, I get by pretty well without one living eight miles into the country. A computer though, well, can't live without that. :)

If money is no object, some of these may fit your fancy.

GGG said:

If money is no object, some of these may fit your fancy.

Well, money is an object in this case, but thankfully I'm pretty good with saving up. Some of these computers look nice, but what caugt my attention was this quote:

The guy who wrote the article said:

Granted, the DIY crowd could shave 50 percent or more off of these prices.

That's what I'm going for. Fuck paying those prices when half the cost is going in some corporate big wig's pocket.

The type of computer you are talking about it most certainly possible and indeed already out there. Fitting such a thing into a Desktop PC will be your challenge. You could probably get a Quad processor motherboard designed for server use, which would also support enough ram to demolish a small building but then you'd be lacking in other parts - Server machines aren't designed with graphics compatibility in mind, for instance.

And then if you want to run windows on it, your standard copy is only licensed for 1 or 2 CPUs so you'll need a new copy. Which will cost you a fair bit probably.

It's all very well these guys saying "Yea run it with 50 CPUs and 20 graphics cards!!!1" but the hardware to actually pull this off is way beyond your price range.

What makes you think it would even be much faster. It's not as if all programs are optimized for multicore/multiprocessor operations. Especially whatever bloated new game is coming out that might actually require it.

Also, if you tried to build a top of the line computer right now, you would be done in the butt by D3D10/Vista and the new hardware that will come out for those specs. Then you would just end up having to buy another $500 video card for D3D10 once it's available.

Most of the applications you want to run are probably single-threaded anyway, so having multiple cores/CPUs won't make a dent in the runtime (unless you're multitasking heavily). Getting rid of mechanical harddrives in favor of the solid state variety would help to get rid of "lag," but that's going to be phenominally expensive. A consumer version of this with limited space is reviewed here, but to get a usable amount of space (maybe 1TB? :) ) befitting a REAL ULTIMATE POWER machine you're looking at $1.6 million.

In other words, I think you have to set your sights a smidgen lower.

Johnatone said:

What is the most state of the art, top end program out there? I.E

no, firefox asshat

AirRaid said:

And then if you want to run windows on it, your standard copy is only licensed for 1 or 2 CPUs so you'll need a new copy. Which will cost you a fair bit probably.

cute :P

darknation said:

no, firefox asshat

Gold!

Johnatone said:

So then you admit it's possible? Sweet. Then that brings about the second question: what kinds of hardware do you guys recommened?

I recommend the Sun Fire E20K pre-built system from Sun Microsystems. It's a great gift for any gamer or power user. Heck, you can go and order it right now.

darknation said:

no, firefox asshat

Nah, that's easy, just give it 8 gigs of RAM and it probably will be fine.

Probably.

With no extensions.

AndrewB said:
I recommend the Sun Fire E20K pre-built system from Sun Microsystems. It's a great gift for any gamer or power user.

This looks like the system for me. Besides Doom, are there any good games available for Solaris 10 running on sparc64?

And I wonder if I could get the price down by a few hundred thousand by leaving J2EE out; I could always get by with a free standard runtime. Too bad not even NetBSD will run on an UltraSPARC IV, I could save even more by not getting Solaris...

AlexMax said:

Nah, that's easy, just give it 8 gigs of RAM and it probably will be fine.

Probably.

With no extensions.

You mean 8GHz

Probably.

Or the combination of both would be best.

You can't make something you won't have to upgrade. From the looks of things, we're going to be integrating more and more cores (currently dual core processors are still relatively new, but before long we'll probably pack four cores in, and then as manufacturing methods make it possible, eight -- who knows when) into both the system's main processor and the graphics card. Parallel processing can do a lot for speeding things up, but it isn't everything. Some instructions must be executed in series. You can't frost a cake until it is baked. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and so as individual technologies in computers make leaps and bounds, the rest of the components have to catch up. Right now, the main bottleneck is input/output operations (and has been and probably will be for a long time).

Anyway, system requirements for programs will continue to rise. To hear the oldbies tell the story, programmers these days are lazy. To a degree, it's probably true, and people load up code libraries just to use one function out of them, stuff like that. But we're doing more with the computers. And then there's security becoming more of a problem and thus requiring more computing power. So on...

As far as desktop systems go, you'd do better to just keep up with current events and build a MID-RANGE desktop/gaming system. If you save up every year and buy a $500 to $1000 machine, you should be OK.