When the Hypersonic Missile Technology (HMT) team at COLSA Corporation and the U.S. Army need to model hypersonic flight on a computer system, they’ll no longer have to wait two months to get results. The HMT team, headed by senior scientist Dr. John Medeiros, now has access to one of the world’s largest and most powerful computers: a supercluster of 1,566 64-bit, dual-processor Apple Xserve G5 servers.
Called MACH5 – an acronym for Multiple Advanced Computers for Hypersonics – the Apple cluster “gives us more than 60 times the computational power of our current production machine,” says Medeiros. What used to take two months can now be done in a day. “A single person using a hand-held calculator – without pausing to eat or sleep – would need more than two million years to calculate what the Apple supercluster can calculate in a single second.”
“Once you have that kind of computational power,” Medeiros adds, “you can look at things with higher resolution and see other problems you want to investigate. Plus you can tackle much larger problems.”
Medeiros and the COLSA team chose the Xserve-based supercluster to model the complex aero-thermodynamics of hypersonic flight for the Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM) of the U.S. Army at nearby Redstone Arsenal. Working with the COLSA team, Drs. Billy Walker and Kevin Kennedy of RDECOM conduct leading-edge analysis of hypersonic flight for a number of important military programs.
At its peak, the supercluster can exceed 25 teraflops – calculating more than 25 trillion floating-point operations per second. By comparison, the world
Can this supercomputer send email?
yah….really FAST
So this should be number 2 then, right?
Is the MACH5 interface command line or GUI (i.e. OS X)?
JadisOne,
It can also send viruses to unsuspecting Wintel users. WHOOSH!
Seriously, what an amazing setup, I’m gonna get one in my attic, just as soon as I’ve reinforced the floor.
Not only does it do email but you can surf for porn virus free. Or so I hear.
It runs on Mac OS X Server.
The sidebar clearly states the OS as being OS X Server!!
How many other institutions seriously consider XP Server as an operating system when designing a super computer?
�A single person using a hand-held calculator � without pausing to eat or sleep � would need more than two million years to calculate what the Apple supercluster can calculate in a single second.�
Zoom – Zoom – Zoom
a single person using a hand-held knife – without pausing to sleep or eat – would need more than 2 million years to kill the people a Hypersonic Missile can kill in a single second.
Sure, a 1,566 Xserve G5 cluster is fine, *if* you’re an artist or designer. For real work, you need a PC.
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After looking over the article, a few considerations:
1. FORTRAN? How quaint!
2. IBM’s C++ compiler is now available on OS X? Quick! Recompile and rerun all the benchmarks!
3. They use PowerPoint and Keynote for presentations? I’d love to see how that works out (eg, they do the presentations in Keynote and then have downloadable PowerPoint slides?)
4. 110 tons of HVAC?! Your average home air condition is two to five tons. Average computer rooms are 30 tons or so. The scary part? According to the article, the G5 ran the coolest! I’d hate to see what the others required!
5. Unfortunately, they don’t name names in the benchmarks. “One cluster alternative…” indeed! C’mon, man! Which one?! We need bashing material! :^)
The second Mac SuperCluster. I wonder how many more to follow?
Who would have figured Apple would be the new dominating force in Super Computers?
LOL GO APPLE!!!
…For “real work” you need a PC…
I couldn’t agree more… after all its “real work” to patch these damn things every day, it’s “real work” to reboot all the time, it’s “real work” to reinstall your OS every week, it’s “real work” to put up with the grief of everything not working for no aparent reason…
Yep, for “real work” you do need a PC. You just need a Mac to get stuff done
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Bah humbug. I still prefer my overheated, virus prone, power demanding, more expensive, crash plagued Windows Server clusters.
We are still #1!! EAT THAT APPLE!
Sincerely,
IM A. Lemming
“a single person using a hand-held knife – without pausing to sleep or eat – would need more than 2 million years to kill the people a Hypersonic Missile can kill in a single second.”
Actually, a hypersonic missile could kill very few people. It’s that explosive warhead that kills people.
Still, it made me laugh.
Anybody know how much this thing cost?
It would be cool if the next Mac Cluster beats the NEC Earth Simulator at a fraction of the cost.
Mac Bitch = Slut
“Anybody know how much this thing cost?”
I can’t find the reference, but I believe it was somewhere around $5.5 million.
“It would be cool if the next Mac Cluster beats the NEC Earth Simulator at a fraction of the cost.”
Oh, you could definitely beat the NEC Earth Simulator at a fraction of the cost. What’s a more interesting question, to me, is what kind of system could you get for $350 million–the cost of the NEC Earth Simulator.
Let’s see…I could get 70 COLSA clusters for $350 million. Assume 15TFlops per cluster (actual, vs. 25TFlops theoretical). 70 x 15 = 1050…
1.05 Petaflops. Mmm…
Now, I know clusters don’t scale linearly, so I doubt a $350 million Mac cluster would break the Petaflop barrier. But it’s nice to dream…
Mac Beth for Presdent.
oh yes tim but not for you. only for davido.
NEC’s Earth Simulator is safe for a while yet. While clusters of commodity machines are orders of magnitude cheaper to build and maintain, the overhead of the message-passing model (interconnect speed, co-ordination etc) limits their real performance to somewhat less than theoretical peak. Add to that the fact that there are problems for which clusters are uniquely suited; they can’t touch traditional brute-force supercomputers in many areas, so they’re inefficient for some spheres of research. A jack-of-all-trades cluster could include one or more supercomputers for the heavy lifting, or if you have something like Bill Gates’ bank balance, the ideal solution would be to build a cluster of supercomputers.
By the way Tim, that was a totally uncalled for remark, you judgemental dickhead.
Just imagine the FPS in Doom 3!!!
I could use this to build the next game engine, for sure. And I could do it from orbit with Airport Extreme!
Tim, you’re an ass.
MacBeth, your comment was perfect.
Maybe someone will use an XServe G5 supercluster for something a little more worthwhile than missle technology– perhaps for figuring out a way to stabilize a country without bullets and bombs.
I like to think that Apple has and will continue to change the world. Let’s hope its genius goes to developing things better than something for military applications.
How uncalled for. Tim’s a troll.
I wonder if it will run Photoshop in 16 bit…