New Workstation from Appro Packs in the Cores.

Appro International has just announced the XtremeWorkstation. -- a deskside workstation that can hold up to four (4) AMD Opteron Processors. So let's do some math. With four sockets, that is eight cores in one box, and when the Barcelona quad-core comes out, that is 16 cores in one box. Remember your first 16 node cluster? Now you can get 16 cores in a single desk side SMP system (Symmetric Multi-Processing).

Appro XtremeWorkstation

Here are some details, the XtremeWorkstation offers a maximum of 128GB of memory, up to 4 TB of SATA disk space, dual GigE, up to two PCI-Express x16 slots for high-end graphics cards such as the nVidia Quadro FX4500 X2 or the nVidia Quadro FX5500 and plenty more (pdf data sheet). Supports Linux and Windows.

There are no interconnects other than HyperTransport. The good news is you can run all your existing MPI codes so there is no need to pull out messages and add threads to your application (unless you want to of course).