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

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.

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.).