MacDailyNews - Where Mac news comes first

 MacDailyNews Poll

Deal of the Day

5 Day Most Commented

Opinion Archive

Current Headlines

Latest Joy of Tech

  • Latest Joy of Tech!

MacNN

AppleInsider

Macworld UK

TUAW

MacRumors

Yahoo! Finance AAPL

iTunes Top 10 Albums

Mac OS X Downloads

Sat, Nov 07, 2009 - 03:52 PM EST  —  AAPL: 194.34 (+0.3099, +0.16%)  |  NASDAQ: 2112.44 (+7.12, +0.34%)

Virginia Tech Power Mac G5 Supercomputer costs 90 percent less than nearest competitor
Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - 02:33 PM EST

Virgina Tech's Apple Power Mac G5 Supercomputer project is shaping up to become "one of the world's cheapest and most powerful supercomputers," according to The Washington Post's David McGuire. 1,110 Apple Power Mac G5 Dual 2GHz machines will be linked together to comprise this new supercomputer. And it'll be cheap, too. Very cheap. "All this is expected to cost $5 million, 90 percent less than the next model up on the supercomputer hierarchy," McGuire reports.

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: 90 percent less than the next fastest supercomputer? That's gotta turn some heads; even those who would usually ignore Apple and the Macintosh. Virginia Tech's supercomputer project is going to be pure gold for Apple.

(Updated 4:45 PM EDT: Fixed headline from dollars to percent - thanks guys.)

Bookmark and Share

Always -- Free ground shipping with orders over $50 at the Apple Store.

Reader Feedback: = registered.
Unregistered users: Feedback from multiple usernames are subject to deletion. Off-topic and posts from suspected astroturfers will be removed.

Sep 23, 03 - 03:17 pm Comment from: Seahawk

Err.. 90% less means that the competitor costed $45 millions more, not $90

Sep 23, 03 - 03:22 pm Comment from: Seahawk

Apart the computational error, MDN is right. It will make more than one to mull over it.

Maybe even those who say high-school students should have Wintel PC to be prepared for future high skilled professions. What if they'd head for scientific work at Virginia? wink

Sep 23, 03 - 03:31 pm Comment from: Nagromme

In other words, the G5 solution cost one-tenth of the next option.

Sep 23, 03 - 03:32 pm Comment from: Fred Mertz

Where was $90 million mentioned in place of 90 percent? I don't see $90 million mentioned anywhere. What am I missing?

Sep 23, 03 - 03:41 pm Comment from: bjh

Obvious typo; a dollar sign in place of a percent.

Sep 23, 03 - 03:41 pm Comment from: Seahawk

In the title of the MDN page: "Virginia Tech Power Mac G5 Supercomputer costs $90 million less than nearest competitor"

Should be "...costs $45 millions less ..."

Sep 23, 03 - 03:44 pm Comment from: Fred Mertz

Oh yeah, I gotta get some sleep...

Sep 23, 03 - 03:47 pm Comment from: Seahawk

bjh would be a typo if 'millions' was not there. Mental typo, rather

90% million less has still another meaning wink

Sep 23, 03 - 03:48 pm Comment from: Seahawk

MDN: sorry for having been pedantic.

Sep 23, 03 - 04:11 pm Comment from: cindy

At this level moving up the hierarchy is very spendy. Some estimates are that it would have taken about $7M to $8M to do this with Linux and Opterons... A $50M supercomputer gets you into the top few (like 3 or 4)

the top machines are

NEC's Earth Simulator (talking well north of $100M) 35.86TF

ASCI Q 13.88TF

MRC Cluster 7.6TF

ASCI White 7.3 TF

ASCI White would be well over $50M

You need 4TF to get into the top ten these days. They must be aiming at something better than 7TF if they hope to get in this year's top 10.

Sep 23, 03 - 04:28 pm Comment from: Seahawk

Wow, Macs at over 7 TeraFlops....

Sep 23, 03 - 07:04 pm Comment from: --

It's designed for 10 TF.

Sep 23, 03 - 08:20 pm Comment from: Hello

10 TF

Sep 23, 03 - 08:57 pm Comment from: TheloniusMac

Is it true all the machines will be running Talking Moose as a new kind of monitoring interface?

Sep 23, 03 - 10:32 pm Comment from: Lobsing Sangsong

Is it true all the machines will be running Talking Moose as a new kind of monitoring interface?

You are getting sleepy. Your eyelids are getting heavier and heavier
-TM

Sep 23, 03 - 11:41 pm Comment from: Aldo

In 3-5 years when the system becomes obsolete you can sell the computers on Ebay, the racks would even make nice shelves. Sounds a lot easier than trying to sell a used super computer.

Sep 24, 03 - 12:08 am Comment from: smallpotatos

By the time those 3-5 years have passed the size of the machine may have increased substantially in regards to the total number of nodes in it, too. This might add even more substqance the argument Mac users have long understood - long-lived value derived from their Mac investment. Seems to me that early on in the hub-bub about this project there was some mention of a planned upgrade. I also recall seeing some discussion of the practicality of mixing node horsepower as newer more powerful boxes become avaialable.

Sep 24, 03 - 08:17 am Comment from: AMP

I heard the initail tests were running very well...but an unusaul glitch keeps coming up with the number '42'.

Reader feedback page 1 of 1 pages:

Always -- Free ground shipping with orders over $50 at the Apple Store.

Add Your Feedback:

Register or Login

Name:

Email: (optional)

Emoticons | Allowed HTML Tags

Remember my info   Notify me of follow-up comments?

Please enter the "MDN Magic Word" you see in the image below: