Cray’s deskside supercomputer running Windows

According to Jack Schofield, on the Guardian’s Technology Blog,  Cray have just announced a deskside supercomputer, running Windows HPC (the high performance computing version of Windows Server 2008).

This took me by surprise for a number of reasons:

• “Deskside Supercomputer” – Wow. I still remember seeing my first Cray supercomputer at CERN in the late 80’s, with a picnic bench around the outside. Now we’ve gone “deskside”
• Jack calls it “cheap” –at $25,000 (approx £14,000) it might be cheap for a supercomputer, but not quite in the same league as a normal “deskside” computer
• It’s available on amazon.com – That’s really game-shifting – buying supercomputers from the same place I buy books, games, CDs and ironing boards (yes, we really did get our last ironing board on amazon.co.uk)

Anyway, I’m not planning to buy one just yet, but thought it was worth sharing! Read more on Jack’s blog