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Virginia Tech Upgrade: PowerMac G5 to Xserve G5

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the that-didn't-take-long dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Virginia Tech officially announced that they will be migrating their G5 Supercomputer from PowerMac G5s to Xserves. According to the article, the Xserve G5s will reduce power consumption, heat production and decrease the system size by a factor of three. The pricing of the upgrade is still being determined, and according to Srinidhi Varadarajan, they are working on getting "very good homes" for the PowerMac G5s which will be replaced."

4 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. Speed Improvments by beelsebob · · Score: 5, Informative
    While providing no real speed improvement this should actually speed up the cluster by a factor two - The XServe G5s have error correcting RAM in which should stop them having to run jobs twice just to be sure of getting the right result. They may even get a slight speed boost from having a 1.1Ghz bus rather than a 1Ghz one.

    Bob

    1. Re:Speed Improvments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      ECC checking only adds a single clock cycle on reads and imposes no additional delays on writes since the ECC generation executes in parallel with other tasks. This delay only matters for the first cycle of a transaction; adding to the overall first access latency. The rest of the data transfers are pipelined so no additional delays are incurred. For well designed memory controllers(SDRAM,DDR) FAL is ~13+ base bus clocks for poorly designed ones ~17+ base bus clocks. 4-8% percent degredation in overall system performance is not likely(perhaps a single test can show this).

  2. Re:The Cost? by jocknerd · · Score: 4, Informative

    They've already covered their costs in publicity and research. Getting on the Top500.org and being ranked #3 is huge. Well worth the $5 million they spent.

  3. I know where they'll end up. by blackchiney · · Score: 5, Informative

    Trust me, the university is not letting anything out of their hands that can't be obsoleted first. It's a state school so they have a pecking order. My first bet is a large majority ends up at the Empo' followed by professors (who are also looking to build a smaller farm), faculty, staff, other state schools, and if we are so fortunate (and this is really a long shot) you can scoop one auctioned[PURCH].