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."
d-: I love mac and own a G5, but you are a silly silly person. Macs have always let you get things done more quickly, but it is pretty recent that we can actually process everything more quickly and cheaply too (-:
I miss the SCSI days though.. I remember being on an PC and wondering "why the heck is it taking so long to transfer files and use the floppy drive". With Macs, I've always been able to get work done, the settings don't change themselves and programs don't mysteriously break. I'm a computer engineering major and I do a lot of graphics, so both are well fulfilled by OSX (though I'm not sure about Xcode.. especialyl the debugger, but I haven't had time to really learn it yet)