[Info-vax] The Future of Server Hardware?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2012-10-04 02:23:06 +0000, JohnF said:

> Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
>> One size does not fit all.
>>> JohnF wrote:
>>> Is there a pretty standard whitebox configuration people typically
>>> put together as a gpu platform -- MB make and model, power supply
>>> and cooling options, memory, etc? And is nvidia/cuda the current
>>> favorite among the gpu/"language" options to put in that box?
>> 
>> There are probably almost as many options as there are opinions.
> 
> There seem to be several out-of-the-box vendor-assembled solutions,
> e.g., http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal-supercomputing.html
> as well as build-your-own recommendations, e.g.,
> http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_build_your_own.html
> (and plenty of non-nvidia pages about all that, too)...

Intel Xeon Phi, as well.
<http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/high-performance-computing/high-performance-xeon-phi-coprocessor-brief.html> 

I'd expect others.

>> But then this is not the best group for x86-64 HPTC questions, either.

If you're thinking of basing this on Linux as I might suspect, see 
which GPU vendor is currently making and keeping the Linux folks 
happier; who has the better or more open drivers has varied over the 
last couple of years.  I haven't paid all that much attention to that, 
but which bunch is binary-blob and which is open-source and 
particularly which is stable will be as interesting here as the 
hardware itself.

There's almost certainly a Linux HPC group or forum or resource around.

Current OS X includes OpenCL and some clever GCD threading syntax baked 
into the clang compiler, if you have one of those boxes around.

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