You remember Virginia Tech: They were the ones who bought up all the PowerMac G5s (1,100 total) when they first shipped in 2003—delaying shipments to us common folk—to build System X, the third-fastest supercomputer in the world (at the time), which clocked in at 12 teraflops.
Well, that wasn’t good enough for them, and they eventually replaced their PowerMac G5s with Xserve G5s—which made System X a whopping 20% faster.
And according to Infinite Loop, the VT folks are still not satisfied—they’re building another Mac-based supercomputer, this time clustering 312 Mac Pro towers to achieve a ‘theoretical computing capacity’ of 29 teraflops.
The new system will not replace System X, according to CHECS Director Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan. “Unlike System X, which is a production machine for computational science and engineering researchers, the new system is intended to be pure computer science research system,” he told Ars.
Ah ha. But what kind of ‘pure computer science research’?
The system will be used to study two main areas: power-aware software systems that can adjust performance automatically to maximize efficiency, and distributed shared memory systems that can run existing threaded code on high-performance clusters “as if they were scaled up versions of multi-core desktops.”
Yeah man. Totally.
Check out the Infinite Loop for some great info on both System X and VT’s new Mac Pro cluster, as well they’re reasoning for choosing Mac Pros over Xserves. They also have some preliminary info on VT’s plan to eventually upgrade System X itself.
[Update: Corrected the typo that said System X was 29 teraflops—it’s actually 12. My bad.]
the powermac g5's clocked in at 29 teraflops (end of paragraph 1), and the mac pro towers clock in at 29 teraflops too (end of paragraph 3)?
why bother upgrading if it's the same speed?
were the powermac g5's clocked in around 10 teraflops back in the day?
1100 G5s = 12 TF
312 Mac Pros = 29TF
Wow. Just goes to show what a monster the Mac Pro is. I'm glad I bought one.
"as well they're reasoning for choosing Mac Pros and Xserves"...
The correct phrase should be "as well as their" (possesive, indicating a group (Virginia Tech) decision, as opposed to the contraction "they're" meaning 'they are', which frigs up the sentence...
Proper grammar indicates pride in your work and a higher level of intelligence which I feel this site definitely aspires to achieve at all times! Keep up the good work...
Thanks,
Tuco Ramirez
@Tuco - A mere typo, but thanks for pointing it out!
HELP, HELP, I just bought a new Mac, transfered all my music to it from an external hard drive and authorized the new computer to play my iTunes purchases. But I just authorized my fifth computer and Apple's DRM only allows you to authorize a maximum of five computers. So what do I do know, will I have to use my new Mac forever if I want to listen to my music? Is there a way I can easily take off DRM from all of my iTunes purchases. Please help, if you ever bought any music from iTunes, this will happen to you too.
@Austin: No need to panic. If you go to the Store menu in iTunes, you'll see "Deauthorize Computer." Make sure you do that before getting rid of your old computer, and you'll be fine.
If, for some reason, you forget and you hit the 5 computer limit, you can also deauthorize *all* of your computers by going into your iTunes Store account preferences (click on your login name in the top right when you're in the iTunes Store) and clicking "Deauthorize All."
Problem solved!