What is your dream computer?

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Betzalel
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22 Mar 2008, 12:22 am

CaptainMac wrote:

A brand new Mac that could run System 6 or 7 plus MS-DOS and Win95.

Try SheepShaver its a virtual machine that can run MacOS 9. (even on a non PPC Macintosh... I really hate that they didnt port the Classic compatibility support in OS X to the intel version of the OS...)

theres another emulator by the same group called Basilisk II which is on the links section of the page.
Basilisk II can run System 6 and 7 and emulates Motorola 68k based Macs.

anyway go to http://sheepshaver.cebix.net/ to find out all about it.

Aaron_Mason
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26 Mar 2008, 6:01 am

LostInEmulation wrote:

Betzalel wrote:

I think MacOS X is a great desktop OS. but as a commercial UNIX it is very much lacking. if they produced better documentation on the internals and what all of the configuration files do under /Library etc do I would like it a lot more. until then its a neat toy thats very useful on a desktop and easily managed but its not well documented enough to fully support when the sh** hits the fan or you need to do something apple never thought of. Sure I've done it but it was a major pain in the ass because of lack of good documentation and Apple basicly throwing off any standard UNIX conventions to do their own thing without telling anyone.

So right. A colleague of my mother (computer science teacher and admin of everything IT of the school) said the Mac OS Server he uses forgot many settings - no one understood what happened or what to do to keep it from happening again (and of course they refused my offer to 'be locked in the computer-pool for a weekend and set up a Linux to replace it Apple software' and instead 'solve' this problem by paying 400-ish € for an upgrade)

Heh... they deserve that if they're going to act like that.

My dream computer would take a bit off all computers in a network for one super computer. I have an idea as to how to do it too - but for gaming it would rely on QEMU getting support for DirectX/OpenGL video adapter emulation.

It would go like this:

* All lab computers would run a specialised Linux distro that runs an rsh server with root access blocked. For Windows it would run XP under QEMU.

* A number of computers would run QEMU running Windows XP (again) with MPICH to access all of the lab computers through rsh. These computers will use the spare processing power of the lab machines to run themselves.

* Have a couple of servers use the network as well. In a decent uni campus-sized network, there would be enough spare processing power to run every single web server and database server and still have room for more.

Not bad, eh? With a little perseverance I think it could work.

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gamefreak
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26 Mar 2008, 7:54 am

I don't know if servers count but i`ll want something with these specs.

Intel Quad-Core Xeon Processor
32GB DDR3 Memory
16 TB Western Digital Hard Drive @ 10000RPM
1 GB Nvidia GeForce Video Card
Windows Server 2008 along with CentOS[Dual-Boot]

Did i mention a 100MB/s TL Fiber Optic Connection

Aaron_Mason
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27 Mar 2008, 12:04 am

Servers are computers after all. Are 16TB hard drives in existence yet, or are you talking about 16TB in a striped RAID array?

Distributed computing is something of a passion of mine, a bit of a shame that I can't afford to try anything. I'd need quite a few computers to get any sort of noticeable result.

Though one guy made a distributed computer array out of Mini ITX boards, 12 nodes used about 200W at full peak - a fraction of the power of just one Quad Core server, with many more times the processing power!

To use the words of Seymour Cray:

Seymour Cray wrote:

If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?

Even though that claim is becoming harder and harder to justify, what with compiler optimisations and all...

gamefreak
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27 Mar 2008, 9:49 am

Aaron_Mason wrote:

Seymour Cray wrote:

If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?

Even though that claim is becoming harder and harder to justify, what with compiler optimisations and all...

There are 16TB`s out right now but they are $3500. You can only get them from Western Digitaa though.

exiled_sage
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24 Aug 2008, 3:23 am

I'd say some ridiculously powerful processors, gobs of ram, etc. But truth be told in a couple years, they'll probably have as much or more computing power in a Nintendo DS 8 (Or what they replace it with)
I'll just have to wait and see what's on the market then.

nodice1996
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24 Aug 2008, 7:49 am

the one I built thursday

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Eggman
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24 Aug 2008, 2:21 pm

blue gene....silicon mous brains.....

Diamonddavej
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24 Aug 2008, 2:58 pm

My ideal system is the nVidia Tesla D870, a desktop supercomputer.

No. of Tesla GPUs 2
No. of Streaming Processor Cores 256 (128 per GPU)
Frequency of Processor Cores 1.35 Ghz
Floating Point Performance 860 GFLOPs (1 TeraFLOP peak)
Memory 3 GB (1.5 GB GDDR3 per GPU) at 800 Mhz

http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_d870.html

Fuzzy
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24 Aug 2008, 3:19 pm

I can see a problem with modern gaming with processor cores at that speed.

Are games like crysis designed to scale to match number of processors, or do they only use 2?

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Keith
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24 Aug 2008, 4:37 pm

I see someone wrote in SATA and IDE hard drive. I have to laugh at this one as they are the same.

The correct term would be Serial ATA or ATA7 (I think it's 7) Can be funny though...

I'm working on a JBOD/RAID6 computer with 3KW psu and probably close to 30TB Hard drive space with 16GB RAM

Paddy789
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24 Aug 2008, 6:21 pm

Diamonddavej wrote:

It's an external GPU, a graphics card in other words. 2 Geforce GTX 280s would probably match the speed of it for much cheaper, since they can do CUDA too.