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Drooling Over VA Tech's 1100-Node G5 Cluster
Mr. Slurpee writes "Virginia Tech's 1100-node dual 2 GHz Apple G5 Terascale Cluster is getting racked up and ready to roar. If you're a penniless geek like me, at least there's some tech pr0n for us to drool over. There's 1100 of them ... think they could part with one?" Update: 09/22 02:55 GMT by T : Matt submits a link to this full mirror of the photos, writing "The page owner's comment on the original mirror being taken down due to bandwidth? 'Bring it on!'"
Imagine a beowulf clu...oh, wait.
Oh God.
Imagining each one of those came with just a little bit of Steve Job's Reality Distortion Field, someone from NASA might want to head over there and make sure that some kind of tear in space/time doesn't occur right there. With that many G5s, we don't know what level of destruction could happen.
insert all your g5 are belong to us joke here
the full sized cases will provide greater resistance to all the spoooge that will be sprayed over them by spontaneous orgasms of the hordes of apple fans comeing to worship before the mother of all apples.
we got the dual processor g5 we ordered in at the university I work at and have had it for a while. I guess apple is really pushing to make the institutional customers happy. and if a university gets a g5 dozens of students can play with it and drool over it and become filled with g5 lust while if one regular customer gets one they'll just hide in their room mumbling about 'my preciousssss' and fondling it and that's not very good advertising and is sorta creepy.
I hope they were able to run these without video cards. I can't imagine 1100 brand-new sweet ATI video cards sitting idle for years...
As a Professional * Information Technology Location Analyst and Physical Security Specialist I need to use my professional abilities to make a professional analysis of the situation for my professional collegues so that we may put forth a professional solution to this problem.**
* - I really, really hate people who make gratutious use of the word "professional" as some sort of elitist mark of supremecy
** - I would like to run in there, see if the machines are locked down, and grab as many as I can hold.
(And yes, I'm just joking, I don't want to steal anything from them and I neither have the plans nor the means to do so, it's just a joke people)
I think you answered your own question: they've got 1100 ... one of those was yours.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I'm really feeling for the poor slobs who have to lift 1100 of those beasts onto shelves. G5s are heavy!!!
Truly amazing, how many of you ever thought you would live ling enough to see Apple win a contract based on price?
I, for one, welcome our new 64-bit overlords!
talk to VA tech, i'm pretty certain they'll have 1099 of them to spare right about now.
Exactly.
It is quite the fashion statement :)
(Excuse the blurriness and poor lighting - crappy cam and crappy dorm lighting)
Second picture, bottom row, three in from the left.
Yeah, except for the fact that the front is covered in a mesh of holes, with fans sucking air through them. Maybe that's why you can see clear plastic hanging down in some of the photos.
Well, if you order about 1000 of them, I'm sure they'll move you up on the priority list :P.
Funniest thing I've seen all day.
And I'm a Mac guy, too. I wouldn't mind wandering through that room for a while myself... though I probably would keep my pants on.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
This just keeps getting better, doesn't it? I have an old dual-P II Xeon 400 box that's louder than hell (60mm fans x 4 plus some regular case fans, and of course the power supply, all of which comes together in the most hideous triple-tritone), and throws off enough heat to allow me to keep the furnace off in the winter (no, I'm not kidding).
What did I name it? Balrog, naturally...
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Yeah man I don't understand the big deal with G5s for this kind of application. I'm sitting here in front of my 1100-unit dual-G5 cluster at my freelance gig trying to copy a 17M file from one folder to another and it's taking over 20 nanoseconds. My Cray at home would be done with this already, and even my beowulf cluster of TRS-80s wouldn't take this long....
Between the on-campus nuclear reactor and the supercomputer cluster, I'd keep an eye out if I were Tech's cross-state rival, University of Virginia. I'd say the Hokies are just one diabolical dean away from becoming an evil university bent on world domination. And five bucks says they start in Charlottesville.
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something