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Own a Piece of An Apple-Based Supercomputer
Graff writes "Now that Apple has come out with the Xserve G5, Virginia Tech has been swapping out parts of their 'System X' supercomputer for the more compact 1U Xserves. MacMall is selling some of those System X component G5 systems with an approximate $200 savings and an extra 512 megs of RAM over a normal G5. You can read more about it at MacCentral."
As someone else noted, if they were engraved or etched or something that would make them special.
I believe that the Apple recommended restore procedure for an XServe involves booking from a copy of the OS installed on your iPod (which connects via FireWire).
You're more likely to back up onto tape.
There's no reason why you can't plug the tape drive in over FireWire. FireWire is basically a serial variant SCSI (okay, I'm oversimplifying a bit here) and with speeds of up to 800Mb/s it's fast enough for most things. You probably wouldn't want to connect your RAID array via FireWire, but for backups it's plenty fast enough. Many tape drives only let you write at Oh, and by the way the G5 units they are selling are intended as workstations not as servers (hence the digital audio out and the Radeon 9600 Pro, neither of which is really required for a server).
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Should that be a concern? Do these 6 month old computers already have 2-3 years of typical mileage on some of their components?
This is an educational and research establishment, not a commercial enterprise.
/.) that Virginia Tech would have sold the units to students, freshmen, whatever, at a knock down rate. Or even used a ton of them within the university itself.
You'd have thought (as some students were hinting here at
Yet more profiteering from a supposedly educational institution.
I was a bit confused by the decision to include Firewire in this machine. I know it is an apple kind of penchant, but surely a server won't need firewire.
Actually there are lots of reasons to include firewire on a server.
- You can hang a firewire mass storage device off of it to backup (tape, disk, etc), boot from (recovery, etc), add extra storage in a pinch, etc.
- You can create various types of clusters using firewire. One product is the sancube.
- It's cheaper to design in a feature that may not be used in one incarnation of a product, but may be usable in others. Case in point your comment about Audigy sound cards on high end Intel servers, those very same motherboards are probably used in both servers and high end workstations, no point in having two different motherboards just to save a few pennies off of a $500+ mobo.
Why oh why do companies use mail in rebates?
so they can stick low price tags in big numbers on the shelf. That's gotten me a few times - you see, "Oh, an X for only $19.95!" so you take it up to the counter, and the cashier rings you up for $39.95 - often by then the consumer is already psychologically committed and just pays it. It's a common tactic, rebates are just one methode of exploiting consumer naivety. Bottom line is, it generates more sales.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
What would be spiffy if there was a way that they could do SOME of the math on the GPUs. I never saw a product that could do that, but it would be rather fast. No?
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
They did need them badly. Without having them so soon there wouldn't currently be a Virginia Tech supercomputer on the TOP500 list and they'd have to wait another year to try to get listed.
mbbac
No VT needed the PR probably more then Apple now they get grant money out the wazoo
Please don't begrudge us this. Virginia's state legislature has cut over 28% from our 2002 level of funding, while just recently passing laws which effectively cap tuition hikes at about 5% per year. My tuition has gone from $1500/semester (2001 in state) to almost $2200/semester (2004 in state).
And please don't respond with "blah blah, if they used the money more effectively". We're up against the wall here. About 5 professors in my department (History) out of 25 or so have been laid off, or sent on research sabbatical so that they don't have to be paid. We've fired over 1/2 of the maintenance staff, and people on campus no longer have trash cans in their dorm hallways - they have to take their trash outside to a dumpster. The snow trucks in Blacksburg have far less salt than they had last year to clear the roads (I only think of this as I sit here at Netmar and watch today's 3 inches of snow fall). I now this isn't grave hardship, but seriously, we've cut about everything we can.
The supercompuer gives us both grants and positive PR. Students see that, despite the state of the economy, we're trying to push to the top of research institutes. We're trying to push ourselves above 67th (or whatever) on that college engineering school ratings, trying to compete with our neighbor down interstate 64, who, for no discernable reason, has an engineering program with the inflated ranking of ~ 15th. And yes, we get grants from the government and money from private industry in exchange for timesharing on the bigmac.
Just let this one go. We need the money, the BigMac has not only made us money, but has raised awareness of the university. It's a good thing.
~Will
sig?
My guess is that both they and Apple wanted to have a spot on the last Top 500 list, with all the associated press at the Supercomputing 2003 conference. Apple's been trying to convince somebody, anybody to build a large HPC cluster with their hardware since the G3 came out. Until the G5 came out, it made very little sense economically -- the per-system price for Apple kit was 30-40% more than comparable Intel-based stuff, and the memory bandwidth and 64-bit floating point performance was the same or worse. The G5 fixed that, for the most part
Nobody in their right mind wants to build a cluster out of machines in desktop/deskside chasses. We've done it once, with the first generation Itanium systems where there was no rackmount option for a 2-way box, and we'll never do it again -- remote management of those machines was and is actively painful. (Our 1st-gen Itanium cluster is out of production service now, but it's been partitioned up into smaller clusters at universities around the state as part of the Cluster Ohio project, which we still manage.)
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
They used to run all simulations twice to verify the non-ECC RAM was returning the desired result. As a consequence the system will speed up two-fold in real life use. Now that is a performance gain!
I'll admit that a 6-month replacement cycle is pretty short, but it actually makes sense because they're avoiding the worst of the depreciation. I'm not up on used Mac prices, but x86 server hardware depreciates around 50% per year (refurbished 2 year old x86 servers routinely sell for around 20% - 30% of their original price; refurbished 3 year old gear sells for well under 10% of it's original price. You can get a maxed out Quad processor P-III server for well under $5000 which cost $50K when new.
That said, I don't think that this is a good deal. $200 savings on a $3000 box is only a 6.7% discount for 6 month old hardware; a 20% - 25% discount would be more in line with current market.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
At the risk of the inevitable flaming, I have to aqree with this posting. I'm not questioning Linux or it's proven abilities, but what so many Windows (and Linux) users fail to understand about Apple's business model is that it's -not- the same as the commodity market that they enjoy. Apple makes their products in a "holistic" manner... they tightly control the hardware, operating system and pre-installed applications in order to deliver a seamless experience to the end user.
Bottom line... if you're the kind of person who feels Apple hardware is overpriced because you can't assemble it yourself and run Linux on it, then you're missing the point and Apple probably doesn't want your business anyways. It's not outright stupidity that has kept Apple out low-end market all these years... it's a market they've intentionally chosen not to enter. Case in point.... Steve Jobs killed the whole Macintosh clone market when he returned to power at Apple. UMAX and PowerComputing were offering faster machines for less money, but were totally clueless when it came to delivering any value-add on the end-user experience.
I'm not saying this is in a "snob" context... it's just the reality of their business model. Apple wants to sell a G5 (or iMac or PowerBook) to somebody who -doesn't- want to assemble their machine. The whole point of the Macintosh is in the fact that you don't need to do any of that.
Take heart though... IBM is apparently going to be (or already is) selling 970 (G5) based systems in some form running some flavor of Linux... so if it's only the bad-ass CPU you're after there will be other ways of getting your little flippers on them.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
Well, from what I can see there is barely any difference between the memory controllers on the two systems. It looks like it was just a new revision of the same ASIC. Apple doesn't exactly provide many details on this, but it looks like the new memory/processor controller chip would be a drop-in replacement for the chip used on the original Powermac. Therefore it's possible (even likely) that they will use this new revision on the next revamp of the G5 line. In fact, they could well start slipping them into the current line-up without telling anyone about it.
I don't anticipate that Apple will sell any desktop G5's with ECC memory installed at the factory, but if the memory controller supports ECC you could easily replace the factory memory with third-party ECC memory.