"The definition of a civilized computing platform: the time requiredto learn how to use it is less than the time required to complete a major simulation on it." - Bill Buzbee, Arctic Region Supercomputing Center The Beginnings It was the summer of 2003, and university staff members in the computer science department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia had just heard Steve Jobs announce the G5 at WWDC. The new Power Mac G5 had a rather masculine, sharp edged enclosure, and it contained not one but two IBM PowerPC 970 processors running at 2 GHz. The Virginia Tech people...