JPL Clusters XServes

burgburgburg writes "MacSlash has a brief note how NASA's JPL has put together a cluster of 33 XServes that was able to achieve 1/5 teraflop. The original article notes that the Applied Cluster Computing Group, using Pooch (Parallel OperatiOn and Control Heuristic Application) ran the AltiVec Fractal Carbon demo and achieved over 217 billion floating-point operations per second on this XServe cluster. More importantly, their research indicates that no evidence of an intrinsic limit to the size of a Macintosh-based cluster could be found."

Comments

"no upper limit"

[Anonymous Coward]

... except maybe price? :)

(it's a joke. laugh.)

Re:Where's the GigE switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gigabit Ethernet. Hope that helps.

Obligatory Post with a Splash of Lemon

[Spencerian]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster getting beat up by a Xserve cluster on the playground and stealing its lunch cycles!

Myth... ?

[EyeSavedLatin]

Don't believe the Gigaflop myth! Oh wait, that's "MHz Myth"... sorry, as a Mac owner, I have to whip out that response in every thread. Carry on.

Re:Where's the GigE switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way, it's called XServe, not XServer.

But is it pronounced "Eks Serve", "Ten Serve", or "Throatwarbler Mangrove"?

(Gordon Bennett, lucky they didn't call it ServeX!)

In the Top 500 Supercomputers...

[jpellino]

This would put it at #343 on the Top 500 Supercomputers* - right below the University of Edinburgh's Cray and just ahead of the IBM cluster at Williams-Sonoma. Yes, Williams-Sonoma.

Of course I fully expect the employees of the West Hartford Apple store to ceremoniously run three doors down and moon the folks at Williams-Sonoma. Ah, Mall Life.

(*the whole lot of which just got its lunch eaten, dope slapped and girlfriend stolen by the new NEC cluster in Japan - 35,860 GFlops, Los Alamos is 2nd & 3rd at 7,727 with two of their HP server clusters.. sheesh.).