“Yesterday I stood inside what is probably the world’s third-most-powerful supercomputer – the Terascale Computing Facility at Virginia Tech. (I say ‘probably’ because the testing won’t be done till next week – the Department of Defense is using it right now and can’t be interrupted.) It’s composed of 1100 Macintosh G5 computers running in parallel,” Andrew Kantor writes for USA Today. “These aren’t your run-of-the-mill Macs; each sports a 2.3 GHz IBM PowerPC 970 processor, which isn’t available to the Little People. But before you Mac people start giving each other high-fives, you should know that the university didn’t say, ‘Hey, let’s make a supercomputer out of Macs.’ They were interested in that PowerPC processor, which IBM happened to sell to Apple for those Macs. (All right, one high-five is allowed.)”
MacDailyNews Take: For some reason, Andrew wants to make quite sure that his readers think they can’t get a Mac G5 with a “2.3 GHz IBM PowerPC 970 processor,” but anyone visiting Apple’s Retail Stores or online Apple Store knows that “the Little People” (all sizes of people, actually) can get dual G5s with speeds of up to 2.5GHz. The first incarnation of Virgina Tech’s “System X” (Big Mac), the one that achieved the world’s number three ranking, was constructed of off-the-shelf Apple Power Mac G5s with dual 2.0 GHz processors running Mac OS X. Next Andrew wants to pretend that Apple does nothing and it’s all IBM; who would want a Mac for a Supercomputer, anyway? But, you Mac people really should start giving each other high-fives because as IBM and Apple both explain, “Apple collaborated with IBM to leverage this industry-leading design for the G5, combining an optimized Velocity Engine with a new superscalar, superpipelined execution core that supports more than 200 simultaneous in-flight instructions. But you won
people who rely on usa today for tech information are the same kind of people who go to mcdonalds for healthy food…
moo.
2.3 GHz G5 in Xserve enclosure. Andrew is right, when he said it “isn’t available to the Little People.” These must be few prime G5, which had low power loss. It also means, we probably will be see 2.3GHz Dual G5 Xserve available to the “Little People” near future!
USA Today is never known around journalism circles to be the brightest. It’s the equivalent of McD’s in the newspaper area. It’s just popular cos’ it’s dumbed down further and colorful.
Like a lot of other things, someone had to design the architecture that runs the IBM processors and Apple did that.
The guy actually comes off looking dumber than anything else.
The article is pretty weak, however I think MDN is guilty of more spin here than USA Today.
The Wintel rock seems to des-integrate. Some cannot see that !
Like WE could not see the � collaps of Apple about 8 yrs ago.
Once again, we are reminded of the power of the media to create and shape public opinion and knowledge. The one thing that Apple has going for it is that their product IS much better than Windows.
People are waking up, people are switching.
2005 should be a banner year for the Mac, if for no other reason than Windows is about ready to collapse. People have simple had enough of the trouble that is Windows.
At a BBQ last weekend I came upon a conversation that was Windows users griping about bugs, viruses and instability. At the end of my little “switch to Mac” talk, I pulled out my PowerBook and let the gang play with it for a while.
There were 8 people in the conversation – so I’ll see how many have Macs by the end of the year. I predict 3 to 5 will be switching within a few months.
We will see.
The Wintel world is full of idiots such as this moron. I have also found this to be true in the educational sector of computer related courses because of the lack of knowledge coming from both the instructor and the text they utilize.
And USA had that terrible person Michael Moore write an opinion piece the other day. What a shame!
What a dolt. Like a lot of power pc processors would do anything sitting on a desktop not connected to a motherboard.
These machines have nothing to do with Apple other then the logo on the box they came in…
They had to turn off the GUI in order to have a command line interface so they could interact with the cluster.
These are computers are not using OS X or anything Apple !
This is an IBM cluster period.
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disgusting Michael Moore is more like it!
This guy is a fool. Not a lot more I can say really, apart from I’m off to Turkey for 2 weeks tomorrow!
But before I jet off:
Sputnik, you are by far and away the funniest troll I have ever encountered. The command line IS part of OS X, the motherboards are designed by Apple, the machines are sold by Apple, so Apple get the money.
Next you’ll be saying MS-DOS isn’t part of Windows.
TTFN MDN posters.
“These machines have nothing to do with Apple other then the logo on the box they came in…”
So I guess Apple only manufactured the packaging?
“They had to turn off the GUI in order to have a command line interface so they could interact with the cluster.”
Wrong again. They turned off the GUI because they didn’t need it, not because they had to. Any honest person can tell you that the command line is accessible from Terminal even with all the Aqua stuff running.
“These are computers are not using OS X or anything Apple !”
Really? That should come as a shock to Dr. Varadarajan and the staff of the Terascale facility.
“This is an IBM cluster period.”
You just don’t give up, do you? IBM manufactures the processor, which is jointly designed by Apple and IBM, and Apple makes everything else, including the OS that runs it.
It’s not as if you didn’t know all this Sputnik, I’m responding for the benefit of those who don’t, and might be taken in by your blatant lies. Others here have claimed that you’re just exhibiting “irony” and “humor”, but you’re merely tiresome.
Man this guy is a moron!!! On his website he has a blog article about how he HATES the Mac and he’s glad it only has a small percentage and flames it for everything. Kind of funny though, he’s slamming on 9 and comparing it to xp, but what he fails to realize is that it was not the competition to xp, it was the competition to win 95/98, by the time xp is out it was already trying to copy OS X!!!! Man, you really got to pity idiots like that. He fails to realize that 9 is history and fails to acknowledge that even in it’s worst days, Mac OS was more secure and stable than Windows is today and that OS X has standard features now that won’t be available on the WinHell machines for another 3 years.
sputnik ….
you just dont get it…
Apple + IBM designed the G5 TOGETHER !! ….
Do you love Billy Gates and M$ so much you cant see that there really is a better platform out there ??
But, you go ahead and make sure youve downloaded SP2 and all the other “patches” to your WinTel box, in hopes that maybe… just maybe … you might end up with a system that “just works” .. half as well as Mac OS …
If you really want to support Microsoft Research & Development… buy AAPL
You dolt !
“I’m off to Turkey for 2 weeks tomorrow!”
Lucky you. Do us a favor and post some pictures of the Topkapi and the Hagia Sophia. And under no circumstances should you swim in the Bosporus.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” /> Have fun!
Hey Sputnik is really starting to grow on me. I find his statements hilarious to the point that I have a file saved of all his lies
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” />) I am not backing him up as I am a die hard mac user and would never concider windows, but he is funny as hell and I think some people take him waaaay too seriously. Relax guys.
By the way michael moore is great. He is showing the US what George Bush is really like. I think you americans should respect his opinions because he is using his right for freedome of speech. Or does it only work when it suits the Goverment?
At the VaTech website, the final paragraph talks of the first build’s lack of “error correcting code (ECC) RAM” as the prime reason for the teardown and rebuild. Apparrently, a system can’t be used for scientiffic computation without ECC, which the PowerMacs didn’t support? Could someone post something here that would help relieve my ignorance concerning ECC?
http://www.tcf.vt.edu/systemX.html
“Well with the concept proven we now had to make sure we had a system capable of conducting scientific computation. We needed to upgrade the system to something with error correcting code (ECC) RAM. The Power Macs did not support it and the XServes were coming. So in January we tore the system down and started prepping for the XServes. And now they’re here and we have our final system. The best is yet to come.”
I looked at the page, and I didn’t see a single machine using the 970. Nor one above 1.8 GHz.
As for “who, other than Apple, uses the processor on their motherboards?” — the answer is IBM, which is planning some machines using it. But it gave the processors to Apple first, which both Srinidhi and I found amusing.
Thanks for your polite, professional letter. I’ll file it appropriately.
Andrew
You wrote:
Well, the PowerPC processor is available to anyone, little or otherwise
here :
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/71708/ wo/Lg7ndSlhx6N82uLCudPHej7qaT3/0.0.9.1.0.6.21.1.2.1.2.0.0.1.0
The PowerPC 970 processor is worthless unless it is connected to a
motherboard and who, other than Apple, uses the processor on their
motherboards ?
Please do more research before you stick your foot in your mouth again.
Sincerely,
Sputnik,
They very much use the Mac OS. Except that they operate in the command line fashion. If you think Darwin is plain vanilla BSD Unix, you are mistaken. They have made several improvements to that on the peripherals. IBM makes PowerPC, who makes the architecture for the computer?
Processor is one thing.. but desining the computer is another. And Apple gets the credit there.
ECC RAM is a memory where when you read a word it checks and corrects for bit errors. When you store information in memory as a sequence of binary values (which are in turn stored as electrical charges on small capacitors),sometimes when you want to read them back, you read 1’s as 0’s and/or 0’s as 1’s. It is not very many times, but it may happen especially when you do a lot of reads/writes.
So, when you have 32-bit number, you can check if it is in error when you read it by having more bits. If you want to correct the wrong bit, then you need much more number of bits. (you would require 6 bits to correct a single bit error in a 32-bit number). So, the ECC RAM allows you to correct single bit errors. Some double-bit errors can be corrected, but notn all.
I do not think this is a great problem as there are several ways to tweak the performance. I am sure they will find out that ECC RAM does affect the performance, but not necessarily the primary factor for moving there.
One primary factor that I can think of is the space constraints. You can probably put 5 Xserves in the same place that you would put 2 PowerMacs. That’s a factor of 2.5 times the # of processors in the same space. (Expansion in future)
Here’s the space conserved from XServe.
Where they used to put 8 power Macs, now they have 32 Xserves.
PowerMac: [a href=”
“]Earlier arrangement[/a]
XServe: [a href=”
“]New arrangement[/a]
That takes up 1/4th of the space then! (approximately)
Here’s the space conserved from XServe.
Where they used to put 8 power Macs, now they have 32 Xserves.
PowerMac:
XServe:
That takes up 1/4th of the space then! (approximately)
I have read the entire article, and I agree that the MDN spin is flatter and faster than any spin the author might have had in mind. Nonetheless, there are a few damning with faint praise comments in the article, so I sent a very polite, friendly email to Andrew.
Re: the 2.3gHz thing. I know my memory is corroded, but I remember these being faster, like 2.6 or something when the switchover was first announced. I thought they were able to remove some internal components that VT didn’t need and get better cooling. I can’t find a reference quickly and I need to get out the door. Can someone straighten me out (be polite)?
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” />
Mike