JPL Clusters XServes

Posted by pudge on Friday November 15, 2002 @04:49AM from the mmm-speed dept.

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."

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Re:"no upper limit" by 00_NOP · 2002-11-16 00:02 · Score: 3, Insightful

Seriously, there will be an upper limit in a practical sense! Basically the speed of light will impose a practical limit - if it akes longer for information to pass up and down the system than it does to wait for a new instruction to be queued on an existing element of the system then there is no point in extending the system.