“Using several new technologies and more than 1,000 dual-processor Power Mac G5 computers, Virginia Tech University is building a supercomputer cluster that is likely to rank among the fastest in the world,” reports Jay Lyman for TechNewsWorld.

Lyman reports, “In addition to the G5 machines, the university said it is using a beta version of the latest release of OS X, new networking hardware from Mellanox and Cisco, and cutting-edge configuration and cooling technologies to build the powerful cluster for a fraction of the price of a traditional supercomputer. ‘The total price tag is probably a factor of 10 lower than a machine in this class in the past,’ Virginia Tech College of Engineering dean Hassan Aref told TechNewsWorld.”

“The latest announcement highlights the departure from monolithic mainframe supercomputing to less expensive, grid-like configurations, Yankee Group senior analyst Dana Gardner told TechNewsWorld. ‘This is further evidence of going away from symmetrical multiprocessing mainframes and moving more to a distributed grid of relatively low-cost nodes,’ he said. Gardner, who said OS X’s BSD kernel roots and Linux and Unix heritage make it ideal for the Virginia Tech cluster, indicated the key to the newer grid approach is the technology layer above systems,” Lyman reports.

Full article here.