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Is that Fast ?

Well I think it is Pretty Fast.

Man, imagine how fast you could check your email on that system!

I wonder what Dell's market share is in the new Univerity SuperComputer Market. I bet it's lower than Apple's. BTW Michael- the iPod, not the "Dell Digital Junkbox", will be coming to a Wal-Mart near you.

Weiner Boy: That machine isn't going to download your spam any faster.

Yes, that is fast. That is fast enough to make the top 10 of fastest super computers in the world.

The VA Tech runs at about 10.28 Teraflops (it is ranked 3rd world wide)

The Myrinet interconnect appears to be significantly faster than the Infiband used at the Virginia Tech install. VT used 1100 dual 2.3ghz to get 12+ teraflop.

The less glamorous aspect of these announcements is not the performance - it is the energy consumption. We don't even think about it with a desktop, or an iMac, or a Powerbook, but the absolute dividend of the G4 and G5 architectures is the small footprint which minimizes the energy requirements. Significant time was devoted to this issue at the XServe presentations during the Worldwide Developers Conference.

These boxes are killers from every cost/performance perspective, especially energy to run and keep cool.

Supercomputer, Supercomputer, Supercomputer, Supercomputer, Supercomputer, Supercomputer, Supercomputer. I want my software to run on a supercomputer...
(Ballmer seen dancing round his office)

what's a flop?

besides a bad choice of word for something that is supposed to sound impressive.

Apple - give them the extra nodes for free - think of the publicity when the figures come in!!!!!

FLOP = FLoating point OPeration(s per second)

In related news Dell has just announced a cluster type computer which is expected to be so fast that it will not be rated in teraflops - but rather "belly-flops."

Responding to this news, Ballmer of Microsoft was quoted as saying, "we invented belly-flops!"

homer,

A flops is a FLoating-point Operation Per Second. Supercomputers measure speed by how much math they can do not the megahertz rating of their processors. This way, supercomputers with completely different architectures can be compared realistically.

I bet you can surf all the porn sites faster than with a Dell cluster.

Holy sh*t, that server room has some manly cooling capacity (from someone who works in commercial HVAC, that's a compliment).

I wonder what they'd need if the place ran Intel chips. Magnetic containment?? We don't have reactor technology on that scale yet.

For those of you that may be mathematically challenged, 10 TeraFLOPS is very fast.

First let's talk about the speed of light. At (aprox.) 186,000 miles per second, light can travel around the equator (24,902 miles) almost 7.5 times in just ONE second. That's pretty far for just one second.

Now, in that same second, the U of I computer can perform 10,000,000,000,000 floating-point instructions. So now let's chop up the 186,000 miles into 10,000,000,000,000 parts to see how far light travels during just 1 instruction. That comes to .0011785 inches per instruction. When you're talking about something zipping along at the speed of light, it doesn't take long to go one one-thousandth of an inch.

In slightly less brain-numbing terms, in the time it takes this same 7-global-trips-in-one-second light to go from your monitor to your eye, a whole 24 inches, the U of I computer could have performed about 23,365 floating-point operations.

If you can't picture the speed of light coming from your monitor, let's say you can type at a blazing rate of 150 wpm (750 characters/min). This computer can perform 800,000,000,000 instructions BETWEEN each of your keystrokes.

RE Aryugaetu....

My eyes hurt after reading your post....it's that monitor light It's TOO FAST! Aaaahhh

Using Xserves in supercomputing clusters is just a fad, you know, like Cray. Remember them? Anyway, it's a one-time product. There's no sustainable business model here - like, how many clusters can there be anyway?

Now, Dell is focused on businesses first. We sell them our products to use as cash registers, ordering stations, and kiosks.

1) 186,000 MPS - it's not only a good idea, it's the law!
2) Will this Turing Cluster be able to pass the Turing Test? I don't think so.

(The Turing Test is a classic question in Artificial Intelligence first posed by Dr. Alan Turing. If the computer can respond to questions sufficent to fool the questioner that it is human, then it passes the test.)

As a U of I Alum, it's nice to see we have braggin' rights for teraflops and basketball. Go Illini! We just whumped Michigan State, now let's go kick Dell's ass!

i wonder if a virus will bring that system down faster

just think, even though mac don't have virus

wondering if u could write virus for window base websites

and then redirect them to the apple website and bring

down the website like that virus did to that Microsoft

website?

on second thought

delet that since it might give virus writers that idea

theman-x: nope. It is nonsense. An Apple website would run Apache. A Windows based web site would not. A virus shutting down a Windows web will do absolutely nothing on an Apache web server.

Viruses are highly specific, they do not migrate from one OS to a different one. The vast majority of viruses are Windows ones, not computer viruses.
Some attacks Linux, some fewer Unix of various incarnations, NONE attack OS X.

Cheers

I love this thread. Cheers to all posters

oops, I meant the thread on Microsoft iPods

Nicely put Aryugaetu. Now for the important question. This article specifically states that these machines are each connected with 100/mbs, the same rate supported by the Mac Mini.

Does this mean Mac mini's would work in the same spots with the same software?

What about this: Every powermac could add boards that have 2 chips on 'em.
O.K. now you can put THREE boards, in the THREE slots...
Now you get 8 GHZ !!! total power.
That's 8GHZ(say with a dual 2 ghz machine)
Or 11GHZ (say with a dual 2.5 ghz machine)
Anybody can add the boards.
Now can somebody make those boards I'm talking about?
Would OS X be able to use 'em?