Tyan Computer, a specialist high-end motherboard and system maker, has just released its latest Typhoon PSC personal supercomputer series, developed for compute-intensive applications in graphics rendering, data warehousing, financial and statistical analysis, scientific research, and the oil and gas industries, informs DigiTimes.

"With the introduction of the Typhoon PSC, Tyan is delivering a new kind of product that brings supercomputing into the office," commented Jeff Smith, UK manager of Tyan Computer.

It seems that the supercomputers can support up to eight processors and 64GB of memory, Linux and Microsoft's Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, and comes with eight Gigabit Ethernet ports and capacity for four Serial ATA HDD devices.

"The PSC will enable scientists, researchers, and developers to process simulations and visualizations faster, finish research experiments quicker, and provide them with an alternative to higher-priced, expansive server rooms that require huge amounts of resources and extensive infrastructure to support. We believe that the Typhoon PSC will create a new personal supercomputing market."

Furthermore, the supercomputers are based on AMD Opteron 200 series processors or Pentium D processors. According to the manufacturer, the AMD model sports up to 64GB of DDR400/333 registered memory, and the Intel model can take up to 32GB of DDR2-667/533 of unbuffered memory.

Tyan said that it intends to develop other Typhoon PSC models which will adopt the Pentium 4 and the recently-announced Intel Xeon 5100 series processors (Woodcrest), with high performance FBD registered memory.

"This is another big step forward for supercomputers," said Smith. "The world's first supercomputer, installed in 1977, was 160 mflops (430 times slower than the Typhoon PSC), the size of a small car, required its own power supply and cooling system, and cost almost US$9 million."