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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.