Microwulf: Cost Efficiency


When you have measured a supercomputer's performance using HPL, and know its price, you can measure its cost efficiency by computing its price/performance ratio. By computing the number of dollars you are paying for each floating point operation (flop), you can compare one supercomputer's cost-efficiency against others.

With a price of just $2470 and performance of 26.25 Gflops, Microwulf's price/performance ratio (PPR) is $94.10/Gflop, or less than $0.10/Mflop! This makes Microwulf the first general-purpose Beowulf cluster to break the $100/Gflop (or $0.10/Mflop) threshold for measured double-precision floating point performance.

For comparison purposes:

At $94.10/Gflop, Microwulf is by far the most cost-efficient platform available today for high performance double-precision computation. While it may not provide Tflop performance, it provides more than twice the general-computation performance of Deep Blue. Microwulf thus offers significant computational power at a highly affordable price.


Joel Adams > Research > Microwulf > Cost Efficiency