I'm an OS X fan because of its merits. I'm a fan of some of Apple's other capabilities where merit warrants it. You're not a fan because of -- apparently zero Apple experience. That is a common occurrence.
If Apple has been able to sell these things as clusters for supercomputer applications, that's great but I remember reading about some university research project that built one of the ten largest supercomputers in the world out of a bunch of PS2's.
Virginia Tech hit #3 for only a few million dollars using Apple XServes. No PlayStations have ever hit the list. One guy did make a small cluster out of eight PlayStation 3s. IBM is planning to use the same Cell processor as the PlayStation to make a supercomputer.
but there are consequences to letting software lock you into a hardware vendor that have to be considered
Yet I don't see you railing against Sun servers or IBM mainframes or minis.
Absolutely. There's just no possible way I could have any experience with a software arrangement that locks you into a hardware vendor and that turning out to have been a bad decision.
No PlayStations have ever hit the list.
Researchers create a PlayStation 2-based supercomputer
Yet I don't see you railing against Sun servers or IBM mainframes or minis.
The thread's not about them, and the last I heard, Hitachi had broken IBM's hardware lockin.