Apparently not well or efficiently enough to be used by any firm requiring a high degree of performance or reliability. Thus the reason that Windows has more and higher spots in the Top 500 supercomputers than Apple.
Wait, that's not right, Apple is the one that's had absurdly low-cost systems in the Top 10 and currently holds six places, all above the one Windows system on the list (which, IIRC, cost more than any of the Apple systems on the list).
Apparently not well or efficiently enough to be used by any firm requiring a high degree of performance or reliability.(re: Macintosh)
Some folk would have a different opinion!
Hardware
Compute Nodes:
1100 Apple Xserve G5 cluster nodes with the following specifications:
* Dual 2.3 GHz PowerPC 970FX processors
* 4 GB ECC DDR400 (PC3200) RAM
* 80 GB S-ATA hard disk drive
* One Mellanox Cougar InfiniBand 4x HCA*
* HCA added from third party and not a build-to-order option
Compile Nodes:
3 Apple Xserve G5 nodes with the following specifications:
* Dual 2.3 GHz PowerPC 970FX processors
* 4 GB ECC DDR400 (PC3200) RAM
* 3x250 GB S-ATA hard disk drive
Storage:
1 Apple Xserve RAID unit with 1 Xserve NFS servers.
Total available user storage: 2.7TB
Operating System:
Apple Mac OS X 10.3.9
Beate Schmittmann, Professor, Physics
Some current projects are:
* Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics
* Non-equilibrium statistical mechanics
* Phase transitions and critical phenomena
* Driven diffusive systems
* Vacancy-mediated dynamics
* Percolation and stochastic evolution models
* Field theory and renormalization group analyses
* Monte Carlo simulation techniques
At a past computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that get 1,000 miles to the gallon."
In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If General Motors had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the car windows, shut it off, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
Only one person at a time could use the car unless you bought CarPro, but then you would have to buy more seats.
Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on 85 percent of the roads.
The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "General Protection Fault” warning light.
New seats would force everyone to have the same sized butt.
The airbag system would ask, "are you SURE?" before deploying.
Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally Road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car’s performance to diminish by 50% or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Dept.
Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car. The new model would not run on the old roads
You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.