Meet HELMER, The 24-Core Home PC With 48GB Of RAM

Author: Rees | Date: May 28, 2008

IKEA Furniture Stylee

Here’s a render farm project built by a mad Swede known as Janne, featuring 6 motherboards, 12 4GB DIMMS, and 24 CPU cores in the form of 6 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quads. The computer runs distributed Linux and only uses 400W of power, is quiet, and fits into an IKEA filing cabinet. Best of all it serves its purpose well, by reducing Janne’s 3D rendering time from “all night” to 10-12 min. I guess 186 GFlops of power will do that for you.

That’s some serious muscle, especially with all the motherboards working as one like some kind of giant, power-mad mutant PC. Not only that, but he’s already working on HELMER II, which should churn out 12 teraflops of power. That’s the equivalent of over 50 PS3s!

2 Comments »

Comment by Penge

2008-05-30 22:30:04

Now that is truly remarkable.

To hell with the environment, I want to drain all the electricity in Sweden to power my monster machine!

I bet the first thing he did when it was up and running was look at porn. REALLY fast.

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Comment by SmellyGeekBoy

2008-05-31 11:11:02

Apparently it only uses 400W of power. I think that’s probably been lost in translation or is just a complete dirty lie, though.

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