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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.
Now this system is the cheapest of the top 10.
You may notice that the BigMac is listed as self-assembled. It just doesn't make too much sense to compare a self-assembled system against company-delivered systems. You could do exactly the same thing VT did with G5 Macs using dual-processor Opteron or Xeon systems and end up paying significantly less.
Why don't people? Because most places that build machines that large want something turnkey and something that is supported as a cluster.
Its a good bet too that this thing is going to have lower maintainence costs and higher up-time
Actually, the opposite is probably true: desktop machines, like the G5, do not make good cluster components. They require lots of space, are difficult to access when sitting on racks, etc. And Apple's history on quality is not uniformly good anyway.
on our cluster a tenth that size we blew 60 hard drives in the first 6 months and had to replace 10% of the motherboards.
Who the hell did you buy the cluster from? Emachines? Cluster nodes typically use power supplies, hard drives, memory, and motherboards that are of much higher quality than even the G5 (SCSI, quality ECC, reliable manufacturers, special climate-control systems, and so on). That's why they cost 10x more than the Big Mac. Just watch when the Mac cluster starts going through hard drives and mobos.
Could a five year old Mac even run OSX? I seriously doubt many people will enjoy using such an old machine 5 years from now, even if it is a Mac. In my experience, very old Macs seem just as slow and obnoxious as very old PCs, that haven't been upgraded.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.