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: cost more than 8 million
dollars and had a peak (theoretical maximum) performance of 250
Mflops, making its PPR more than $32,000/Mflop. Since peak
performance exceeds measured performance, its PPR using measured
performance (estimated at 160 Mflops) would be much higher. cost
more than 17 million dollars and had a peak performance