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200-Gigaflop Mac Cluster

Posted by pudge on from the i'll-buy-that-for-a-kroner dept.

Mauro Notarianni writes in that the Danish Technical University (DTU) has developed the Scandinavia's largest dedicated Mac cluster. "Velocity-X" is packed with 32 dual G4/800's (200 Gigaflops), and will be turned on Monday. Its primary use will be studying the influence of proteins on cancer, and, more importantly, large film and animation projects. It can be rented for DKK 50,000 (about USD 6,500) per week.

6 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Re:More importantly? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Start here!
    Continue here!

    By the way, why use regular dual 800, when there is Xserve?

  2. I found... by benjamindees · · Score: 2, Informative

    this article, which may shed some light on what they plan to do with this and why OSX is a requirement. Does anybody know anything more about protein crystallography and why it would require "stereo" video cards?

    --
    "I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
    1. Re:I found... by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 4, Informative

      If you shine light through a crystal, it is diffracted in a specific manner that can be corollated with the internal structure of that crystal. Shining X-Rays through crystallized protein will similarly produce a diffraction pattern that can be used to determine the three dimensional structure of that protein.

      A stereo video card is a system that can present different video images to the left and right eye of the user, producing an illusion of depth. I would imagine that this would be very helpful in visualizing three dimensional protein structure.

  3. xserve not shipping yet by johnpaul191 · · Score: 2, Informative

    i do agree it seems like a much cleaner happier way to do it (if you have the money). unfortunately there are some issues.......

    1) xserve isn't shipping yet. apple site says 2-3 weeks still, though there are rumors they will be shipping any day now.

    2) the dual processor xserve is $4,000 (the single processor is the $3000 model). i would wonder if the included software would be seen as a waste when buying a plethora of these. then again if you are curing cancer i guess worrying about the extra $$$$ for the right equipment seems like crying over spilled milk.

    as posted above, dual 800mghz G4 machines are older stock so i am guessing they were either purchased a while ago, or they got a good price break. i think we'll see them down the road, supposedly the xserve will be easy to cluster. actually according to stories posted here and on MacSlash in the past it seems that people can unbox, setup and startup a G4 cluster in a day.

  4. Re:questions by benh57 · · Score: 2, Informative

    The OS X version os BLAST (a bioinformatics package - what they are doing) is apparently many times faster than any PC version, due to its altivec/vector optimization.

  5. Re:MacOS X cluster by foo12 · · Score: 2, Informative

    This page is mostly Apple PR but it does link to several clustering solutions for Mac OS X as well as Mac OS 9.

    As for the software running over the cluster itself, I'd imagine most of it --- if not all of it --- is custom written for the task at hand.