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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."
UT is in Austin. Dell is in Austin.
Can you say "sweetheart deal," boys and girls? I knew you could.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
but the numbers jumped at me:
38E+6/6E+2 $ is about 60000 $ per machine. Seems to be a little much for a cluster of "cheap" machines, right?
Isn't there more to it?
Ok, off, reading the article.
And you wouldn't get those same discounts for buying large volumes of PCs? I'm intrigued by this :)
It is my understanding that the G5 doesn't support ECC RAM, so how can you trust it's results? With that many machines, the statistics of a bit error in RAM gets quite high.
So you have fast incorrect data.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
I told you Macs were cheaper!
Then I hope they're waterproof too, since the $38M also included the cost of a building to put them in...