Dell $38m Supercomputer [not] More Costly than VT's G5s

An anonymous reader writes "According to the Austin Business Journal, Dell's 3-teraflop, 600 server supercomputer cluster cost the University of Texas $38 million. As The Apple Turns has pointed out that this is 7 times the cost (and a quarter of the power) of Apple's cluster at Virginia Tech! " Update: 10/14 17:56 GMT by M : worm eater writes "The Register has posted a correction to the widely-reported story that a 3.7 terraflop Dell cluster cost the University of Texas $38 million. As it turns out, the computer cost $3 million, vs. $5.2 million for the 17.6 terraflop Mac G5 cluster at Virginia Tech."

Comments

Re:Here's a copy of the apple turns web page

[lederhosen]

Yes, MacOS X is 32 bit.

Often, when doing cluster work you map *all*
the memory of the cluster into virtual memory.
You can then read from other computers using normal
pointers. However 32 bit address space is not enough.

You then have to use explicit message passing,
like MPI.

Re:Here's a copy of the apple turns web page

[lederhosen]

To be fair it is no problem with the hardware,
it is the OS, that needs to be 64 bit.

That is, the cluster would probebly be better
using BSD, GNU/Linux or AIX.

Re:Here's a copy of the apple turns web page

[ikandi]

Obviously, asshole. Find me a mac thread at ./ that doesn't have some retard trolling on about WalMart P boxes blowing Macs away because they retail at less than the build cost of the Apple?