New Orion workstation puts cluster in a box

IDG News Service - A new company thinks it has the answer for scientists and engineers looking for high-performance computing on the desktop. Orion Multisystems Inc. says its Orion Cluster Workstation packs the power of a PC cluster into a desktop-size package using low-power chips and an innovative motherboard design.
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Orion Multisystems emerged from stealth mode today with the announcement of its workstation product. The company hopes to bring back the days of the technical workstation, when engineers could have a computer at their desks that was far more advanced than PCs, said Orion president, CEO and co-founder Colin Hunter.
In the late 1980s, companies like Sun Microsystems Inc. made their mark with technical workstations that were an intermediate step between the desktop PCs of the day and mainframes and supercomputers, Hunter said.
The rise of servers and workstations based on Intel Corp.'s chips led to significant declines in the prices of technical workstations, but the performance of those systems hasn't kept up with the improvements enjoyed within the supercomputing world, Hunter said. A modern supercomputer can run at well over 1 trillion floating point operations per second (1 TFLOPS), whereas a technical workstation based on Intel's Xeon processors is much closer to a PC in terms of performance, he said.
Scientists looking for floating-point performance who don't want to spend millions on a supercomputer have resorted to clustering technology, Hunter said. Clusters are an inexpensive way of amassing supercomputing power, but they are difficult to maintain and they force scientists to coordinate with colleagues to schedule time on the cluster, he said.
The Orion Cluster Workstation takes the idea of a cluster and puts it inside a desktop machine. The company's first product, the DT-12, is a 12-node cluster that measures 18.4 in. long by 24 in. wide by 3.8 in. high -- which is about the same size as a conventional desktop PC.
But this PC puts out about 18 GFLOPS of sustained performance and 36 GFLOPS of peak performance under certain conditions. Transmeta Corp.'s 90-nanometer Efficeon processors are the reason Orion can pack so much performance into a relatively small package, Hunter said. Hunter and Orion vice president of engineering Ed Kelly are very familiar with Transmeta's chips because they co-founded that company before joining Orion.
The Efficeon processor uses a software-based architecture to execute instructions that would normally be handled by transistors. By using fewer transistors than a conventional processor, Transmeta can reduce the amount of power consumed by the chip and put it into thermally sensitive