OH Bovine Excrement!
With that lie, I know you ARE a TROLL... and are working hard to prove you are not pretending to be an idiot. Quit lying.
That Mac based Beowulf Cluster was the 3rd fastest supercomputer in the world, hitting a sustained 11 TFlops and peaking to 15 when it was built for 1/5th the cost of the next least expensive of the top ten fastest machines at the time it was built in 2003, with 1100 dual processor G5 PowerMacs (2200 processors). The next fastest was only slightly faster (15 TFlops) and cost over ten times more and the fastest (33.5 Tflops), the Japanese Earth Simulator, was 30 times more expensive at $150 million.
The following year, they replaced the 1100 PowerMacs with 1350 Dual processor xServes, saving space and power, and, although others had built even larger Beowulf Clusters, the new VT cluster was still the 7th fastest Supercomputer in the World in 2004, and it still came in at a cost three times lower than any of the others in the top ten.
How you can say they "got screwed" is beyond me.
Shortly afterwards the US Army purchased a 1566 PowerMac based Supercomputer called the Mach 5 with 3132 processors in it for $5.8 million, that, although classified, was reported to have been able to do over a sustained 15 Tflops. The Mach5 was reportedly going to be used in designing hypersonic helicopter blades... but nothing was heard much about it after it went into service, being classified. I question whether the Colsa Mach 5 would reach the 15 TFlops speed because the VT got its high speed because of using a high tech Infiniband intercommunications system while the US Army was planning on using the lower tech and much slower built-in gigabit ethernet for intercommunications between the units. My guess is the speed would have been about the same, despite the greater number of processors.
Last year, November, they Virginia Tech built System G with 325 Xeon based MacPros (2600 processor, 2600 gigaBytes RAM) and produced a sustained 22.5 Tflops (trillion ops per second) of throughput with peaks of up to 29.5 TFlops.
“With that lie, I know you ARE a TROLL... and are working hard to prove you are not pretending to be an idiot. Quit lying.”
Stop being a damnable fanboy. You actually believe press releases? Particularly when you touch on fields you don’t work in.
“That Mac based Beowulf Cluster was the 3rd fastest supercomputer in the world, hitting a sustained 11 TFlops and peaking to 15 when it was built for 1/5th the cost of the next least expensive of the top ten fastest machines at the time it was built in 2003, with 1100 dual processor G5 PowerMacs (2200 processors). The next fastest was only slightly faster (15 TFlops) and cost over ten times more and the fastest (33.5 Tflops), the Japanese Earth Simulator, was 30 times more expensive at $150 million.”
No ECC memory and no stable operation. They built one here locally using G5s similar to VT’s. The damn thing never was stable.
“Last year, November, they Virginia Tech built System G with 325 Xeon based MacPros (2600 processor, 2600 gigaBytes RAM) and produced a sustained 22.5 Tflops (trillion ops per second) of throughput with peaks of up to 29.5 TFlops.”
Using Intel chips. The G5 was a flash in the pan.
“The Mach5 was reportedly going to be used in designing hypersonic helicopter blades... but nothing was heard much about it after it went into service, being classified.”
“Hypersonic helicopter blades”.... ROTFLMAO!