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Virginia Tech Announces Supercomputer Plans
CousinVinnie writes "Previously noted in this Slashdot story, the administration of Virginia Tech has announced they're puchasing 1100 G5's (another story) in hopes to build a top-10 supercomputer by October 1. Tech will be spending $5.2 million over five years on the project, which should help it pull in more research money." Maybe VT can use the new computers to beef up their web site.
Woo hoo!! I can't wait to see these photoshop benchmarks!!! ;)
VA Tech is a redneck school in an awful redneck town (Blacksburg). Why should they get a supercomputer? Maybe they should stick to making moonshine and hemp bracelets.
I have recently upgraded from a Cyrix M3/233 with 64 Megs of RAM to a new 3 GHz Intel Pentium IV with HyperThreading and Serial-ATA to help me at my freelance gig where I copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. On the P4 I spent about 20 minutes trying to install Adobe Arcobat 6. 20 minutes. At home, on my PowerMac 4400 with a 233 MHz G3 upgrade, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this PC, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, my Nomad Jukebox will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even IE is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various PCs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a PC that has run faster than its Mac counterpart, despite the x86's faster chip architecture. My PowerMac 4400 with MacOS 8.2, a three row extension startup and Kaliedoscope runs faster than this P4 3GHz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the wintel is a superior machine.
Wintel addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a wintel over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Warcraft III, photoshop....
Why did the VA Tech crew opt to waste at least $1,000,000 just to use G5's? I would be highly upset if I was an alumni and knew that some of my tuition tax was going to this Macintosh fan boy's wet dream.
Why on earth would anyone want to put together 1100 substandard processors like the G5?
Hopefully they'll build a nice big window so all the students can see this beo^H^H^Hcluster of macs. Besure to leave the blinds up though because these same students will be working 2 part time jobs just to afford tuition.
Nothin to see here.
Move along
I went to battle MC Escher, but drew a blank
Are you people stupid. Virginia Tech needs Duck Hunt, they are going to serve it out to thin clients, and use the computer to make a simulation of a forest. The thin clients are modified NES systems. They added ETHERNET! They have to have a hard sex with aligator. WOW! It's their new ciriculum. The kids have to be able to shoot low render quality ducks with light guns, don't you people get it?
This will obviously be used for the hundreds of thousands of outhouses on and around campus.
Yeah, they aren't paying for much. Just to get their dicks sucked by you.
All I'm saying is that if I lay out 3 large for an Apple and I *still* fail it, I'm going to be pissed. On the other hand, if I start beating out those GNAA turds for frost pist, it'd be worth it.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Why make so much fuss about buying a bunch of Macs off the shelf? My grandmother could do that if she wanted. The fact that they want to be finished "building" it (= connecting the cables) seems to be simply that they want to make it into the Top-500 list with $$$ rather than new research.
What they will find out is that the G5 was never built to be run as a server, despite its server-like performance. And 1100 Mac end users (for whose desktop the machine WAS built) will perhaps have to wait longer until they can buy theirs.
Back in the old days any serious computer engineer would refuse to buy off-the-shelf machines and rather build their own -- I believe research should lead the crowd wrt innovation, not follow it! At least they should hack the Linux PPC kernel or build a new cool software layer to contribute something rather than just consume.
Just my two cents worth...
The PowerPC 970 shatters the myth that you absolutely need H-1Bs because supposedly there is not enough talented American engineers to do the work. By nearly all metrics, the PowerPC 970 is competitive with the very best processors produced by H-1B-dominated companies like AMD and Athlon.
The Apple G5 may be slightly more expensive than an equivalent system based on an AMD/Intel microprocessor, but the Apple G5 is worth cost. Buying the Apple G5 supports the more traditional American work environment at IBM as opposed to the brutal, cutthroat environment at Intel.
As The Apple Turns reports here, that the supercomputer cluster's main purpose will be to "impress the living crap out of everyone."
Just thought you'd all like to know
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Probably not. More likely, some money-wad holding executive in the administration who loved Macs, disagreed with the Ph.d's 5.2 million times. The probability is that you are a pimply faced teenager who hasnt yet had a chance to learn how the real world works. Hence your statement.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Wonderful: three pointers to Apple's web site, pointing to pages with slick corporate "interviews". Do you actually work for Apple or are you just insanely zealous?
Apparently the PHD's at Virginia Tech disagree with you 5.2 million ($) times. Or 1,100 times, depending on your view of the world...
Most likely, they got a special deal from Apple, or maybe some other deal was tied in with this and they get a discount on the other deal.
There are thousands of x86/Linux-based Beowulf clusters. There are hundreds of NT-based compute clusters. So, a few universities who also use Macs for compute clusters--not exactly surprising. Maybe they have a good reason why it makes sense in their environment or maybe they are simply making a mistake--it happens.
I see little to recommend a Mac cluster over a Linux cluster. The G5 processors are pretty nice, but in terms of bang-for-the-buck, they aren't anything special. And while OS X makes a pretty desktop operating system, it is very rarely used for compute clusters so there isn't a lot of software for it for that purpose.
Deja vu
Sounds like checkpointing to me. And in any case, while the management program can detect things like fail-stop faults of system components, the only sure way to guard against a few random flipped bits (without ECC) is to duplicate the entire computation.
I don't give a crap what VT's news department claims. READing isn't going to be of much help if you neglect to THINK.
-Justin
That's enough posting for now lads, there're trolls afoot.
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac Cluster (1100 G5/Dual 2ghz with(4*1100) Gigs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac cluster, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that. In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this. I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Mac clusters, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac cluster that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this ((2*2)*1100)Ghz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine. I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.