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

Paying $126k for each server -- idonfinkso

[gregor_b_dramkin]

$38e6 / 300 servers = 1.2667e+05 $/server

Methinks the price tag includes a lot more than the hardware costs.

The comparison with the VT supercomputer is almost certainly not apples to apples (so to speak)

Re:Costs

[robbieduncan]

Apple did not offer them a special deal on the pricing. They sold them 1100 G5s at standard educational discount. What they did offer was a bump up the queue to ensure that the cluster would be running in time to make the November list.

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

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Umm, can you provide some links to back this up? NUMA machines certainly offer this capability, but they are relatively rare and this cluster is certainly not NUMA. I have used several high-performance scientific clusters and I have never yet encountered one that is configured in this way. Surely it would require some substantial hardware support?

To the parent, the focus in high performance computing nowdays is on "portable perforamnce"; for the most part, libraries are written so that the performance critical components are either very small, or self-optimizing (or both). For most applications, the most you might need to do is optimize some of the kernels (eg BLAS) for the architecure.