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JPL Clusters XServes

Posted by pudge on 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."

2 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Where's the GigE switch? by teridon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    All G4s (including the XServer) have GigE built-in. I wonder if the GigE switch was too expensive?

    --
    I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
  2. Imagine This... by EccentricAnomaly · · Score: 5, Interesting

    2004, Jobs WWDC Keynote...

    "Today, I'm going to talking about Mac OS 10.3 and a big part of OS 10.3 is our clustering software.... [blah, blah] ...Apple has long prided itself on the easy of use of our products... [blah, blah] (the tv screen behind jobs shows a room with twenty people wearing apple t-shirts and a stack of X-Serve boxes) ...my friends here have several of our next-generation power-4 based X-Serves running OS 10.3... during this keynote they are going to unpack all of the servers and set up a cluster... ...by the end of the keynote we'll give the cluster a spin and see if we can make it into one of the top 50 supercomputers in the world"

    --
    There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.