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

Very good homes...

[peterprior]

*looks under desk*.. I'm sure I could find room for, oooh... a couple of hundred..

Upgrade cost

[Kris Thalamus]

Does anyone know what the university got in return for allowing Apple to film the installation and staff for the Xserve promotional videos? A reduced price upgrade may have been part of the initial agreement

Re:Upgrade cost

[Kris Thalamus]

Still, unless Apple gave a substantial incentive, it seem extravagant to purchase 1100 G5s and the tower accommodating racks to house them, only to upgrade them a few months later.

Also, a savvy Slashdot reader, leaked the plans some time before the upgrade was officially announced.

Good homes?

[Dogers]

they are working on getting "very good homes" for the PowerMac G5s which will be replaced.

Can EBay be slashdotted? I guess we'll find out now!

A friend of mine had a great idea about this

[Fortunato_NC]

When it was first rumored that VT might replace its G5 boxes with Xserves, a friend of mine shared the idea that the pulled machines should be resold to the public, with some indication that they had been part of the cluster, perhaps a plaque or laser engraving noting that they had been included in the VT supercomputer. I bet those things would be bid up sky-high on eBay!

Instead of going 3x smaller

[laurensv]

why not have a few more Xserves, I mean they already have the infrastructure for that much heat/power/room, so why don't they supersize the Big Mac?

Speed Improvments

[beelsebob]

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

damn them for ruining my joke

[SinaSa]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of th-- oh wait. DAMNIT!

I know where they'll end up.

[blackchiney]

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].

Keep your eye on the ball

[HarveyBirdman]

But I guess they want a super-computer the football team can be proud of...

Or a supercomputer that the football team can spell. "G5" is shorter than "Pentium".

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?