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!'"

Comments

NetBoot is slow?

[2nd Post!]

I haven't actually tried it yet since I don't have access to enough Macs, but I imagine it's something you would start and let happen overnight... I mean, that's more or less how Apple does it in their own stores, wipe and restore overnight, I think. Or at least after the store closes and before the next opening day.

Re:Expensive processor vs. inexpensive processors

[The Infamous Grimace]

Reliability.
No one in their right mind would try to argue that one couldn't build a home-grown system for less. But with optical ports? FW 400 and 800? Gigabit ethernet? USB 2.0? And with said home-grown machines, when the NIC goes bad in one, or a memory slot goes bad in another, who do you call? The NIC or mainboard manufacturer? So you what, keep a list of all your machines, give 'em i.d. numbers or whatever, itemize the guts and who made what (mainboard, NIC, RAM, CPU, HDD, etc.) of each, and hope to make sense of it all when stuff starts to fail? Me, if I was in charge of it, it would make sense to me to farm it all out to one company, and then when something breaks there is one number that I have to call.
Also, lets not forget that this is probably going to be used for research, and if it involves vectors, then AltiVec is the SIMD for you.

Of course, being human, my opinion is suspect.

(tig)

Re:Waste of Space

[GQuon]

Maybe they can put those G5s to use as desktop computers after the cluster has been "retired".