Big Mac #3
 

No, not the sandwhich, but the tera cluster. 1,100 Dual 2ghz G5s in Virginia Tech have placed in the top 3 supercomputers in the world, at over 10 teraflops of info! And just for your information PC users, a cluster of Intel P4 Xenon, with over 2,500 computers only placed 4th, despite having a higher clock speed and more computers.

Hip-hip HORAH for Macs!

The mac cluster was more expensive.


Wetzel

Thats so awesome...http://computing.vt.edu/research_computing/terascale/

AMD>Intel

That is why Intel may have the higher clock speed - but that means jack...

Why yes, yes I did start this argument! :D

I agree. Intel's Hyper-threading P4 was a nice idea and I like them, but AMD is still the way I go.


To the "Mac Rebellion" your arguments are useless, no matter how good they are. Macs have about as much of a chance of becoming the dominant computer type on the market as the American people electing a Libertarian, Socialist, or member of the Green Party to the office of the president. It's not very likely. Im not saying PCs are better then Macs or vice versa (they both have their advantages), but we do have to face reality. I've used macs and Ive used PCs before and Ive liked to throw each of them out the window and beat them with a baseball bat or light them on fire, but I've always been primarily a PC user, and thats the way I'm going to stay.

I know Macs will never be the main, but hey, I don't care, I'm just sharing info on the Big Mac.

Also, the Mac Cluster did cost less than the other AMD and Intels lower on the list.

Given enough money and resources, you could make a supercomputer out of anything.

This MAC supercomputer costs $520 per GFlop... ($5.2 million/10,000 GFlops).

This compares to this AMD supercomputer that costs $100 per GFlop ($40,000/500 GFlops). I highly doubt the extra equipment required to connect a few of these clusters would make up the extra $400 per GFlop...

I don't see how this can be touted as the cheapest supercomputer (price/performance) when the $100 per GFlop barrier has already been broken. You could tout it as the cheapest supercomputer in the top 3. I don't know how much the others cost. But they sure can't advertised that it's the cheapest in the entire Top500, because the one above is in there.

Then of course there's this one and Blue Gene due out next year.

Wait? So hundreds or thousands of the world's fastest 64-bit personal computer is still not the fastest? Huh?

:D

As anyone can tell you, the more processors you add, the less effency you have, so that system for $100 per GFlop is based more on effency and less processors. Plus, all the Macs are off the shelf models, not stripped down motherboard only computers.

As anyone can tell you, the number of processors doesn't decide efficiency. The distribution of the load and network latency does. Lesser factors are processor usage and design.

If the number of processors decided efficiency, then the NEC Earth Simulator (with 5,120 CPUs) wouldn't be at No 1. The NEC Earth Simulator can reach a peak efficiency of 87 percent. By comparison, the AMD cluster above is about 45 percent peak efficient (and if you read the article, you'd see that they are off-the-shelf components as well).

The Mac cluster I've heard is only around 50-60% efficient. Don't go "then that means it will get more powerful". On the contrary, without a complete overhaul of its design, it can only hope to gain marginal increases in efficiency (a few percent) through software upgrades.