Silicon Graphics Incorporated, the renowned high performance computing specialist has created an advanced concept computer called Molecule. This Molecule using mostly off-the-shelf consumer electronics components and packs them all in 10,000 cores into a single rack.

You’ll probably think that this Molecule sounds like a powerhouse, but it’s only a demonstration of how the chips and memory being used in personal computers can be brought together to create a super powerhouse!

For your information, the Molecule computer can handle 20,000 threads of execution, and it’s about 40 times more than a single rack x86 cluster system. The system was fully designed around an Intel Atom N330 chip.

The computer would offer the computing power and memory bandwidth of more than 750 high-end PCs. This means, it would consume less than half the power and less than 1.4 percent of the physical space! Isn’t it sounds amazing?

Basically, most of the general purpose supercomputers in present day have up to 512 cores in a rack, and it can expand to tens of thousands of CPUs.

The largest supercomputers use up to 10,000 cores and it spreads across hundreds of racks to deliver very high floating point performance and application flexibility.

Currently, the SGI Molecule concept computer is mainly focused on memory bandwidth, density and riding the evolution of consumer CPUs, says SGI.

SGI has decided to invent a larger space core computer in the future!

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