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Big Mac Officially Ranks 3rd
An anonymous reader noted that
according to Wired, it will be announced officially on Monday the Big Mac supercomputer is the third-fastest super-computer. The article also talks about some of the amazing supercomputers in the planning stages. The sort of stuff that will make Big Mac look like that old TI-85 collecting dust in your drawer.
WE'RE NUMBER 3!!
WE'RE NUMBER 3!!
WE'RE NUMBER 3!!
GOOOOOOOO TEAM!!
=)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I heard that VT was considering buying a windows cluster, but they couldn't afford an XP license for a 2,200 processor machine. =)
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
You definitely could not do that with Opteron or Xeon systems. VT was in negotiations about price and delivery time with Dell and Apple.
Because Dell can't put a cluster together at a good price, you conclude that "[one] definitely could not do that"? That's absolutely idiotic. Dell is overpriced and they didn't even sell Opterons at the time.
Apple beat out Dell's prices (shocking!!!).
That's "shocking" only to people who don't have a clue what's going on in the PC industry. Of course, Apple beats Dell on price. They probably also beat IBM and Sun. That's not where anybody who is cost-conscious would buy their cluster machines.
Also, the G5 makes a great cluster computer. It comes standard with gigabit ethernet and has very easy access to parts (no screws required to install anything).
Yes, and if you buy a dual-Opteron 1U rack mount, not only do you get two Gigabit Ethernet ports on the motherboard, you also get something that provides even easier access to parts.
If you think that a G5 is easier to maintain than a rackmount, you really have never touched a rack mount unit.
Finally, the Apples make a good cluster because in 5 years or so when they disassemble it they have 1,100 really nice desktop machines. PC's need to be upgraded more often to serve as a desktop computer (that's why Macs have awesome resale value compared with PCs).
PCs running Windows need to be upgraded frequently because people want to run the latest version of Windows. If you run Linux on a PC, it has an even longer lifetime than Macs (and, in fact, five year old Macs will not run current versions of OS X particularly happily).
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of TI85s!?
Forgive me... it had to be said.