norfzorf wrote:
] ] The brand new "Big Mac" supercomputer at Virginia Tech
] ] could be the second most powerful supercomputer on the
] ] planet, according to preliminary numbers.
] ]
] ] Early benchmarks of Virginia Tech's brand new
] ] supercomputer -- which is strung together from 1,100
] ] dual-processor Power Mac G5s -- may vault the machine
] ] into second place in the rankings of the worlds' fastest
] ] supercomputers, second only to Japan's monstrously big
] ] and expensive Earth Simulator.
]
] It was relatively inexpensive, too. $5.2 million.
] Theoretical peak performance is 17.6 teraflops. The
] developers are hoping to achieve 80% of that performance.
]
] Update on TechWeb at
] http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20031105S0011
]
] The significance here is the steep drop in computing resources
] available for solving large problems. How many problems become
] economically tractable if there were a bunch of computers like
] this available to industry and academia?

this is good news for bringing big computing iron back into the hands of regular students. this is a lot of cpu for 5 mil, considering that the 36 (iirc) Tflops Earth Simulator was a billion.

To note, the last LINPACK spec they released was putting them just over 9.5 Tflops, which is nothing to sneeze at, but nowhere near 80%. Some predictions don't show them getting much above 60% of theoretical. Of course, they're still 2nd or 3rd on the Top100 list, so that's pretty neat. Also interesting, they are running MacOS, not Linux.