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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.
~1000 boxes x $130 = big $$$ for Apple. Thanks for paying your mac tax. That is why we call it FeeBSD.
Imagine if that put all that money down on an Intel/Athlon cluster. They could have got at least double performance. But then again it wasn't their money in the first place, it was probably grant money or taxpayer funded NSF.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
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!
Why should they be happy, they still PAID FULL PRICE.
...but did they still have to pay Windows License fees, and SCO rapist fees?
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of an Mac (a G4 with 500Mb of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Internet Explorer for Mac will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even my text editor is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen an Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Mac's faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 1 ghz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Mac is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use an Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
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.
Thanks for confirming that this was just one big publicity stunt, which is true of 99% of what Apple does.
Best Buy can have you arrested
dave, you talk shit, lie and know nothing you are an unproductive fucking moron that never shuts his lying yap.
dave. man, you need to stop bullshitting here and get in front of some peoplple who could shoot you down in real life. believe me, there are no shortage of people that could shoot you down. you are just full of crap.
the reason apple give the academic discount is that those are for zealots in training. because they are indoctrinated into giveing money to the cult, the get a deal on the price. kind of like scientology.