Virginia Tech Upgrade: PowerMac G5 to Xserve G5

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."

Comments

a nice incentive

[nuckin futs]

would be to reward some VT Computer Science majors.
get an A in any programming class, take home a G5.

Re:too soon to initial install

[BandwidthHog]

I assume this was the plan all along, but the G5 Xserve wasn't ready yet, and VTech needed the cluster online for [academic | fiscal | calendar] year '03.

What I wonder is what are they gonna do with all the extra space? Wouldn't they be able to stuff twice as many Xserves in the space occupied by the towers? Anybody know if the electrical and cooling are up to that challenge?

Forward Thinking

[rampant mac]

"According to the article, the Xserve G5s will reduce power consumption, heat production and decrease the system size by a factor of three."

It may seem like a waste to upgrade a system only four months old, but the reduced power consumption will save some dollars in the long term. By ditching the towers, they also save a boatload of space...

Where they can use some some of that extra money to purchase more nodes...

To put in all that extra space...

How many more nodes would it take to surpass number 2 on the list? Or possibly give number 1 a run for its money?

I think VT may be on to something here.

VATech's rise to prominance

[alexhmit01]

Absolutely an impressive school. 10 years ago, they were a joke. Now they built a national reputation via their football team, so people have heard of them, and projects like this put them on the map. When I looked at schools, they never entered the equation. If I was looking at engineering schools today, I'm sure that I would end up applying there.

This is a school with great self promotion and is going to go places. Unlike places like MIT, they don't sit on their Laurels, they are exploding.

I expect that in 20 years, they'll be considered one of the elite engineering schools. Kinda neat to have your college degree appreciate in value because the school gets better. I can't imagine that you don't get a decent engineering education at any engineering focused school, and this research project is a brilliant PR stunt.

Alex

Re:The Cost?

[Christopher Whitt]

What I never understood is why someone like IBM didn't come along and cluster 10,000 dual P4 nodes together for fun to get on the top spot. I'm sure they have the inventory to write that off.

That would be ASCI White, which is currently #8 on the top 500. It's an 8192-cpu Power3 machine, and they didn't do it just for fun. It was #1 on the top 500 in Nov 2000.

Also, #10 on the top 500 is a 1920-node IBM Xeon 2.4Ghz cluster, but why should IBM use Intel processors when they make their own?

Has anyone else heard.....

[Botchka]

...how loud the Xserves are compared to the G5's? I can't imagine the decibels in a room full of them. One thing they don't mention in the article, and possibly another reason to upgrade to the Xserves, is the use of the Server Manager software. This software doesn't work on the PowerMac G5's because it doesn't have the sensors built in that the Xserves do. Not being that keen on cluster arrangements, I wonder if they have another product in place now that does the same thing with the PowerMacs?