OT Supercomputer

[jonseward at mindspring.com]

Thought y'all might be interested:


Low-Cost Supercomputer Is Among World's Fastest Oct. 24, 2003 
	


 
 
	A unit built from 1,100 Apple Macs has achieved a speed of 8.7 teraflops,
putting it in line to be the third 
fastest in the world--at a fraction of the cost of the two machines ahead
of it.
By Aaron Ricadela	

 
	A supercomputer built from 1,100 Apple Macs by faculty and students at
Virginia Polytechnic Institute 
has achieved a speed of 8.7 trillion operations per second, surpassing a
result reported earlier this week 
and putting the computer in line to be the world's third fastest. 

Jason Lockhart, director of high-performance computing at the college of
engineering at Virginia Tech, said 
Friday that the supercomputer, built for a little more than $5 million, is
running the Linpack benchmark at a 
sustained speed of 8.7 teraflops, eclipsing a result of 7.41 teraflops
achieved in earlier tests. That would 
place it third on a closely watched list of the world's fastest
supercomputer--trailing only an NEC system 
called the Earth Simulator in Japan and ASCI Q, a Hewlett-Packard
supercomputer at Los Alamos 
National Laboratory--at a fraction of the cost. 

The official results of the Top 500 list maintained by the universities of
Tennessee and Mannheim, 
Germany, are expected to be announced at a supercomputing conference in
Phoenix next month. 

The Virginia Tech system was assembled from off-the-shelf Apple Macintosh
computers running 2,200 
64-bit IBM microprocessors. "We wanted price-performance," Lockhart says.
The IBM processors in 
Apple's G5 Macs cost one-tenth as much as Intel's Itanium 2 processor and
also less than a 64-bit chip 
from Advanced Micro Devices, he says. About 10 faculty members at Virginia
Tech are expected to start 
writing code for the machine early next year. 
 

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=15600242


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