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.)
Err.. 90% less means that the competitor costed $45 millions more, not $90
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?
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />
In other words, the G5 solution cost one-tenth of the next option.
Where was $90 million mentioned in place of 90 percent? I don’t see $90 million mentioned anywhere. What am I missing?
Obvious typo; a dollar sign in place of a percent.
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 …”
Oh yeah, I gotta get some sleep…
bjh would be a typo if ‘millions’ was not there. Mental typo, rather
90% million less has still another meaning
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />
MDN: sorry for having been pedantic.
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.
Wow, Macs at over 7 TeraFlops….
It’s designed for 10 TF.
10 TF
Is it true all the machines will be running Talking Moose as a new kind of monitoring interface?
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
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.
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.
I heard the initail tests were running very well…but an unusaul glitch keeps coming up with the number ’42’.