I'm asking purely out of curiosity because I'm sure I can't afford one, nor do I need one. But let's imagine I won the lottery and could indulge myself.

What would be the next step up from a PC? Something other than a Mac or Dell with an OS other than Windows, Linux or OS-X. Something that fills the niche previously filled by machines like the VAX. What OS does it use? How much does it cost? $10,000? $100,000? $1,000,000?

And would I have to hire a team to run and maintain the thing?

It seems that more and more people are going for building huge clusters of machines out of commodity parts, and the interconnects between them and the software and configuration is what carries the real cost. Some pretty big clusters do run commodity OSes too - see Google, who run (probably heavily customized) Linux. Others run other things - for example, the world's top super-computer (maybe a tad over budget though ) runs CNK/SLES 9, which I know nothing about.

There are of course mainframes still around, but my understanding is that they are best suited to batch processing style tasks.

I guess the thing I'm really curious about, is what you'd find to do the power even if you did have it?

Jonathan
###
for(74,117,115,116){$::a.=chr};(($_.='qwertyui')&&
(tr/yuiqwert/her anot/))for($::b);for($::c){$_.=$^X;
/(p.{2}l)/;$_=$1}$::b=~/(..)$/;print("$::a$::b $::c hack$1.");

This is what I would think about with that kind of money ...

Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 Server

- Features up to 32 or 64 dual core SPARC 64 VI processors
- Solaris 10 OS: supporting dynamic tracing, ZFS, crytographic infrastructure, IP filter and process rights management
- Up to 288 PCIe or PCI-X slots with the optional I/O Expansion Unit.

I think "the full package" cost could be near $ 180,000.00

Good luck!
Hackman

:
: I guess the thing I'm really curious about, is what you'd find to do
: the power even if you did have it?
:
It would be kind of like owning a Ferrari, a car designed to go 200 mph when the speed limits are 65 mph. Just having the power is an end in itself.

That's not completely true, if you are a
3D artist or 3D game developer you understand
why. Also an architect with CAD.

Good luck!
Hackman

: I'm asking purely out of curiosity because I'm sure I can't afford
: one, nor do I need one. But let's imagine I won the lottery and
: could indulge myself.
:
: What would be the next step up from a PC? Something other than a
: Mac or Dell with an OS other than Windows, Linux or OS-X. Something
: that fills the niche previously filled by machines like the VAX.
: What OS does it use? How much does it cost? $10,000? $100,000?
: $1,000,000?
:
: And would I have to hire a team to run and maintain the thing?
:
:
Seeing as they have pretty pushed the limits of silicon I would wait till the next line of processors come out and spend money on those with a few SSD drives.

Put the truth is this it doesn't matter what type of PC and how powerful it is, the software is still years behind what the processor can do. I mean they are still building on a 32bit architecture.

This post has been deleted.

Macs are only more useful in design