“With the announcement that it is providing 1,566 servers to an Army supercomputer project, Apple Computer Inc. is making a move into the high-performance computing market that may open new doors for the company,” Michael Hardy writes for Federal Computer Week.
“Historically strong in the consumer and business markets, Apple has not previously had much of a presence in the server market, especially not in high-performance clusters, according to analysts. But that may be changing with a new operating system based on Unix, and the horsepower of the PowerPC chipset that Apple machines use,” Hardy writes. “Colsa Corp. recently chose Apple’s Xserve G5 processors for the Army project. The supercomputer that Colsa officials will build should have a peak performance of 25 teraflops, or 25 trillion operations/ sec. The system, to be built in Huntsville, Ala., will model the complex aerothermodynamics of hypersonic flight for the Army. The system is called Multiple Advanced Computers for Hypersonic research, or MACH 5.”
“The Xserve is a superior server, said Anthony DiRenzo, executive vice president of Colsa. He chose Apple’s product based on its performance, power requirements and cost, he said, adding that one key element in his decision was the system’s low power consumption,” Hardy writes. “‘We put these clusters into production for a user who uses it all day and all night,’ DiRenzo said. ‘This thing needs to be up, it needs to be stable, it needs to be online.'”
Full article here.