‘Big Mac’ Supercomputer may open enterprise market doors for Apple
Thursday, February 12, 2004 - 01:57 PM EDT"When Virginia Tech created the world's third-fastest supercomputer last year by stringing together 1,100 Apple Computer Inc. Macintoshes, no one seemed more stunned than Apple itself. Sure, the firm had long touted the newest G5 models as fast. But that referred to their speedy film editing and CD burning, not the massive number crunching needed to sequence genomes or model weather patterns," Ken Spencer Brown writes for Investor's Business Daily. "'It shocked a lot of people,' said Virginia Tech spokeswoman Lynn Nystrom."
"Apple may have more surprises on the way. The company best known for the slick iPod and cutesy iMac is betting that Virginia Tech's coup opens doors to new, more button-down markets," Brown writes. "The supercomputer market itself is tiny. Virginia Tech's system costs $5.2 million — a fraction of the price of similar machines, but out of reach of most buyers. But having this high-tech poster child lends credibility to Apple. That could help as it goes after customers in new business markets. 'This is an area where Apple has been perceived as being essentially not on the playing field,' said Aberdeen Group Inc. analyst Peter Kastner. 'This gives them valid bragging rights.'"
"Stunning design, Apple's forte, isn't so vital in back-office server rooms, critics say. And to hard-core techies, a friendly interface is a crutch for the weak. But Apple's operating system software, OS X, has one big geek allure: Unix underpinnings. Many high-level applications in the science and biotech field are written in Unix. That helps level the playing field, for OS X vs. Linux and Windows. It may even give OS X an upper hand," Brown writes.
Brown writes, "Apple also hopes to lure the non-techie who needs more power. It hopes the easy-to-use software brings server management to the masses, much like the Mac did for PCs. Configuring a new server on the network is as simple as dragging and dropping settings from another one. And users can set up new systems by using their iPod to copy settings from machine to machine."
Full article here.
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"no one seemed more stunned than Apple itself"
I don't remember seeing that.