Supercomputers for the masses

I love the idea of a “quiet, deskside supercomputer”:

The Cray CX1 product incorporates up to 8 nodes and 16 Intel Xeon processors, either dual or quad core; delivers up to 64 gigabytes of memory per node; and provides up to 4 terabytes of internal storage. Systems can be configured with a mix of compute, storage and visualization blades to meet customers’ individual requirements. The quiet, deskside supercomputer features Windows HPC Server 2008 and interoperates with Linux.

Apparently you’ll be able to buy one of these babies for as little as $25,000 from Amazon.com.

Pretty lousy week to launch a product aimed at the financial services market, though.

(via Mary Jo Foley)