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Factual 'Big Mac' Results

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the whole-lotta-clock-cycles dept.

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."

6 of 566 comments (clear)

  1. Favorite Quote by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    An audience member asked if he'd made the purchase through the Apple store. Varadarajan smiled and said that actually, yes, he had.

    1. Re:Favorite Quote by Glonoinha · · Score: 5, Funny

      I can see that one now ... Varadarajan surfs to www.apple.com/purchase

      Ok, max all the options. Cool.
      Now put 1100 in the quantity. Cool.
      Ok (chugga chugga chugga) $3.3 million dollars. Who has the credit card? (silence, *crickets*, the rude sound of nobody reaching for their wallet...)

      Ok maybe it is just me. Of course I have play configured a few systems in the online order systems of IBM and Dell a few times (didn't actually hit 'Submit' however) and it is possible to configure a single $100k machine from Dell. I haven't found the limit at IBM yet as they seem to have more imagination than I do (although it is easy just to get the SOFTWARE on one of their systems to exceed $100k.)

      --
      Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
  2. Re:technical details? like this one... by geoffspear · · Score: 5, Funny
    Tell you what... you build a cluster of 32 bit machines connected with 100 Base T ethernet and come back and tell us how many more nodes you needed and what it cost you when you have one of the 5 fastest computers in the world.

    Until then, quit your trolling.

    --
    Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
  3. Re:Super computer? by isoga · · Score: 5, Funny

    When you get on the list. Then you have a supercomputer

  4. Not a mac fan either... by Epistax · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... but that doesn't matter. An accomplishment is an accomplishment. Besides if an AI manifests itself it'd be less likely to destroy the world and more likely to tell you that your white socks do not match your purple tie.

  5. Executive Summary by cosmo7 · · Score: 5, Funny
    For your convenience I've collected the main arguments people have made against the cluster:
    • They got some special deal from Apple
    • It's running Linux, not OS X
    • Opterons would be faster and cheaper
    • The guy in charge is some Mac zealot
    • It isn't as fast as everyone expected
    • Rockets would not work in outer space as there is no atmosphere to push against