To: Swordmaker
Too bad the little Mac Mini is only 100 base T, how cool to stack up a bunch of them and string together an XGrid of Mini's...
4 posted on
02/04/2005 8:41:34 PM PST by
Barney59
(Now there's a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from here!)
To: Barney59
That's when you get into the serious supercomputer hardware. The backplane has to be wide (128bits prefer 256) and interleaved. That's what makes a Cray a Cray.
6 posted on
02/04/2005 10:29:44 PM PST by
ProudVet77
(Survivor of the great blizzard of aught five)
To: Barney59
Yeah - it could have been a nasssty little machine for clustering if they's only given it a gigabit ethernet chipset. How much more could it have added to the price?
11 posted on
02/05/2005 6:07:12 AM PST by
solitas
(So what if I support a platform that has fewer flaws than yours? 'Mystic' dual 500 G4's, OSX.3.6)
To: Barney59
Have you thought of using IP over Firewire?
15 posted on
02/06/2005 3:20:18 AM PST by
coconutt2000
(NO MORE PEACE FOR OIL!!! DOWN WITH TYRANTS, TERRORISTS, AND TIMIDCRATS!!!! (3-T's For World Peace))
To: Barney59
Too bad the little Mac Mini is only 100 base T, how cool to stack up a bunch of them and string together an XGrid of Mini's... There are a whole bunch of other reasons not to.
- The more processors talking to each other over high-bandwidth, low-latency connections the better, XServes have two processors per, the mini only one, so XServe is more efficient
- You can fit the same amount in a rack as XServes, but each is far less powerful than an XServe -- wasted racks and floorspace
- They don't have the same hardware monitoring with notification of conditions and failures
- Nothing in a mini is swappable, have to swap the whole thing
- The mini isn't 64-bit, which helps a lot on scientific applications
- Many more...
But somebody did come up with the idea of doing Mac mini colocation:
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