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Factual 'Big Mac' Results
danigiri writes "Finally Varadarajan has put some hard facts on the speed of the VT 'Big Mac' G5 cluster. Undoubtedly after some weeks of tuning and optimization, the home-brewn supercluster is happily rolling around at 9.555 TFlops in LINPACK.
The revelations were made by the parallel computing voodoo master himself at the O'Reilly Mac OS X conference. It seems they are expecting and additional 10% speed boost after some more tweaking. Srinidhi received standing ovations from the audience.
Wired news is also running a cool news piece on it. Lots of juicy technical and cost details not revealed before. Myth dispelling redux: yes, VT paid full price, yes, it's running Mac OS X Jaguar (soon Panther), yes, errors in RAM are accounted for, Varadarajan was not an Apple fanboy in the least... read the articles for more booze."
this once again proves what mac fans have known forever.
Dollar for dollar, macs give more power and are a better value than PC's.
>Imagine if that put all that money down on an Intel/Athlon >cluster.
Imagine if you actually spent some money to learn grammar.
It seems a waste that they used the stock Jaguar distrobution instead of creating an optimized distro. If they made a G5 optimized kernel and ran a G5 optimized linpack in single user mode with all unnecssary features stripped out then I bet they could of had at least 10% extra performance. I know, because I compiled Gentoo on my G5 (only took 30 minutes BTW, thats how fast it is) and it runs KDE a hell faster than AQUA. So why did they use a slow operating system on that hardware?
Screenshot of My G5 desktop!
My local computer guy can build me an AMD Opteron system for far less than a G5. I know, I've got one, and it kicks ass.
And this Mac shill Varadarajan (and he is definitely receiving SOMETHING for his PR efforts, that's how the world works -- duh) could have bought an AMD system WITHOUT any of the extra "goodies" Apple forces on you, so the price difference would be greater still. Do the math. This is Mac propaganda, and everybody's lapping it up.
NO discounts offered by Apple? They give ME one, and I'm just buying one little computer. A loaded G5 is CHEAPER than a barebones AMD Opteron? Discount Dell is quoting $9000 per PC, even when they know the PR value in getting this deal? What else on their site shows up at $9000 per box?
If you guys don't smell something fishy with these numbers, Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field is a lot more mind-numbing than originally thought. I pity you.