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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."
I bag the 'go-faster' stripes on the case !
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
I wish there was some kind of engraving on the aluminium casing stating something like "Virginia Tech, Supercomputer node #758 - 2003" Then they could definitively sell it at a Premium. I mean I can get this kind of computer off ebay for more or less the smae price. I need some kind of souvenir that it's from Virginia. How about sending it through the IPOD engraving shop?
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Only 6 months of use out of these things and VT is tossing them out like yesterday's trash. Gee, thanks for doing this after delaying my order for 6 weeks back when the G5s were originally supposed to be shipping to the rest of us. Apparently you didn't need them that badly after all.
8==8 Bones 8==8
It is nice to see the inclusion of PCI-X, we can hope that this is the start of the end of "old" PCI. 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. Who wants to use a firewire hard disk with a server? You're more likely to back up onto tape. It seems akin to a High End commodity intel server having an Audigy sound card with optical out, I don't think there is much point. I think some of the features could have been thought about more on the machine rather than lamely following the tradition of previous iMACs. However, it looks like a great machine, and Mac is coming up in mine, and many other x86 users (I believe) opinions.
tim
Did Virginia Tech's System X have any impact on Apple release the Xserve G5?
/still pissed at Dell for not offering Athlon's, I wanted a 64 bit processor and AMD and Apple were the only companies offering them three months ago
Did the Xserve get any benefit from the optimization of the Big Mac?
Is Virginia Tech going to lose money on this deal?
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
As someone else noted, if they were engraved or etched or something that would make them special.
Why couldn't VT hold their horses? ...)
my bet is... they could.
no one likes building any cluster (not to mention a supercomputer) out of desktops, esp. ones configured like desktops (gfx, no ecc,
but apple really wanted the PR of having the computer cluster, and perhaps to list the revenue in 4Q2003.
so i can't blame them - looks like a fair deal.
Although, I agree that a bit of engraving would go some way towards supporting their value. Is there anything at all, beyond that 1 sentence on the website, for a purchaser to establish that they really do have one of the Virginia Tech machines?
'Never buy the first version of anything' - even if it is $200 less than list price, has been well looked after, comes with an extra 512Mb and used to be part of a supercomputer. Rev2 or 3 is always a better purchase.
"This is crazy, you realise we could all go to jail for this?" - my manager, somewhere I used to work.
So they can make money when people forget to send the form on time, or fill it in incorrectly.
Several companies in the UK do the same for extended warranties. They say "pay lots of money and if your machine doesn't break, we'll refund it after five years". You typically get 30 days after the five years to get your money back, and most people will just forget.
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.
Maybe not quite false advertising, but definately on the borderline. It annoys me as well, especially when you have to wait 3 months for your rebate check.
Actually you were modded down because you were commenting on the sites normal rates and not the actual virginia computers which were on the side.
Then you went offtopic griping about mail in rebates
Karma's over rated. Speak your mind.
Then there are some of the odd requirements. I purchaed a laptop and they wanted the UPC bar code off the box the computer came in. If I rip the box, how can I return the laptop if I decide I do not like it? I want to keep the box in good condition. What if I want to ship the laptop?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Of course this is simple. They make the profit from those that don't send in the rebates. Sounds like the whole insurance scam, well I don't use it, so why do I have it?
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
Surely it is not "the owners of this site" that modded down your post, but the moderators. The moderators are all of us, including you and I.
No but Apple gave all the editors free TiBooks IIRC...
Not to mention that PowerPC chips "load" non-linearly compared to other architectures -- that is, they become far less efficient at, say the top 8-10% of CPU usage time, both electrically and logically. If true, this could definitely shorten their lifespan if it causes excessive heat stress.
Unfortunately, I don't have anything to back that up. Occasionally Google is not so friendly.
Karma: Positive (mostly due to rash moderations)
Fine, I pointed out that was after a $99 dollar rebate for the RAM and a $40 installation fee.
If you notice the MacMall webite, you'll see that the extra memory with mail-in-rebate and installation-fee deal is for all the refurbished models on the page. Only the last column is the Virginia Tech Macs. The Virginia Tech machines already had extra memory installed for Virginia Tech they can't charge the installation fee again! One can guess the deal is if you want even more memory (1.5 gigs).
Chances are they purchased the original G5s at a nice discount (and a cost to Mac users who ended up waiting much longer for their G5s). Their are selling them for $2799 now, without a modem. VT G5s have 1GB of RAM, but the machines must be pretty beat up considering their were a part of a Super Computer that was up 24/7 crunching numbers etc. Massive wear and tear that can not be compared to regular refubs from the Apple store (computers that were used by "normal" people on a day to day basis). Keep in mind that Apple had VT G5 equivalents in their refub section a few weeks ago for $2400.
Also, it appears these machines are promoted as a "part of history", hardly so considering that there is no way to tell that they were a part of VT cluster.
Is there a warranty on these machines? Do people have to buy Apple Care themselves? Considering what these machines went through in the past 6 months these are valid questions people need to ask.
They (Apple) did _not_ get any discount for buying multiple machines. /.
They only got the educational discount. Read the original annouchment on
oo..damn.. it was!
Probably the only actual record the big mac can claim is the shortest time to obsolescence. Not to downplay the achievement though...
Well, it's the fastest supercomputer ever built with off-the-shelf components and the number three fastest machine on the planet -- and that's before the upgrade.
They will probably make quite a decent profit out of this, despite the $200 discount. They must have got pretty decent discount from apple for both bulk buying and promotion. And any self respecting geek will want one of these over a stock G5
As someone else pointed out, these are refurbished by Apple and then sold through MacMall. VT isn't selling them, but traded them back in to Apple for credit towards the Xserves.
Life is short: void the warranty.
The G5 XServe is in no way shape or form an iMac descendant! Wash out your mouth!
In Connecticut, this practice is illegal. You can not say something is free if it involves a rebate - you must say something like :
$100
-$100 rebate
Don't Tread on Me
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); }
Apple's online store is charging $2399 for refurbed dual G5s, and the student store's price for a new dual G5 is $2699, $100 less than the MacMall refurbs from Tech. You can even take $26 more off for getting rid of the internal mode, which the supercomputer refurbs don't have either.
Even if you add the extra 512 megs of RAM from Apple's site (where prices aren't the best), these Va Tech refurbs are only $100 less than what a student would spend on the same box new. Not to mention these 2 GHz duallies are rated as "Buy only if you need it - Approaching the end of a cycle" on the Macrumors buyers' guide page.
So not a deal at all if you're a student (though I have to think students at Va Tech could get the inside track on the boxes -- anyone know?) and not a great price for a refurb if you're Joe Schmoe. And not a box with great longevity, relatively speaking, either, if Macrumors has the lifecycle pegged.
Wait for a processor speed bump unless you're dying to own a little bit of celebrity.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
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...
Why would Apple get a discount? They probably get them for cost. The question is, did VA Tech get a discount.
I beg to differ. I believe that the G5 XServe is an iMac decendant, in the same way that we are decended from somethingopithicus and will continue to evolve into pure being of light. [this neatly ties in all three /. stories, beat it if you can. 1.this story. 2.light chips. 3.culture in animals.]
"Persistance is Fertile" - Me. I can quote myself if I want to.
Hey, that's cool. Where else could you get G5s with ECC memory so cheaply?
They do have ECC memory, right? Having been part of a supercomputer....
Yes, they sat in rack in a temperature controlled room with good ventilation and very little dust (as opposed to something sitting under your desk). Its not processor wear and tear I am concerned with, but other components specifically HD and power supplies ... HDs vary in reliability and Apple is know to have 'issues' with power supplies (from personal experience too).
Yeah, and thanks for calling me a troll, troll.
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
Have you read about this at all?!?! Geez!
Apple had to rush them out to VT at VT's request, because there was an October 1st (or 2nd?) deadline for this year's top supercomputers list. If they had been delayed, they would have to wait until next year, at which point there would be faster G5s (and Athlons, etc). They saw a sweet timing on the release of the G5, so they (they being Virginia Tech, not Apple) went for it.
Just RTFAs!
Lose essential liberties to get temporary safety = get only hassles and security theater.
$19.95 is a lot to pay for an X. My keyboard came with one built in...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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!
anyway if you look at the specs you can see all the silly stuff.... that cluster does not need 1100 Superdrives, or 1100 Radeon 9600 cards..... let alone size and whatnot... i'm sure it was done because the Xserves were just too far off and it was the only machine out there with the G5/970 chip for sale to anyone.
look at the specs:
The systems sold by MacMall are listed as 2.0GHz Power Mac G5s equipped with 1GB DDR SDRAM (2 512MB memory cards); equipped with 160GB ATA drives, a SuperDrive, ATI Radeon 9600 Pro graphics processor, Gigabit Ethernet, 3 USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 1.1 ports, 2 FireWire 400 ports and 1 FireWire 800 port, along with an AirPort Extreme card slot and no modem -- in other words, a stock Power Mac G5 Dual 2GHz system with a memory upgrade from 512MB to 1GB
it does seem the pulled the fibre cards out... they are optional in Xserves... maybe they just swapped those? i don't know if they are the same in both machines normally.
And an original Lisa sold from Apple for $9,999. Hmmm. $1 profit. There's your return on investment.
Anonymous Coward is worse then a Troll.
Plus, even if 100% of the customers send in the rebates, they get the interest off that money for a couple of months. It's also a nice way to artificially pump up your cash holdings before the next quarterly earnings statement. How much do you want to bet that the rebate checks go out a few days after the quarterly financial statements are filed?
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I'll be jumping to buy one. :P
(proud Mac owner already)
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Same troll, different day. At least they mixed it up a little bit, I was getting tired of seeing the old one.
Get with the times. It's a AlBook, not Titanium, and it's FireFox, not Netscape.
Sorry to break it to you but the OS comes with the computer. Each computer is licensed with the OS it originally came with. That's why you can never buy OS X, you can buy the upgrade because the computer is already licensed to accept it.
Anyways your rant about a desktop OS is frivolous. All XServs come with OS X Server, and, depending on the configuration, it is either licensed for 10 or unlimited users.
And basically every computer manufacturer has you locked into some OS. SGI with Irix, Sun with Solaris, and Apple with OS X. But you could always build it yourself off eBay, right.
This may be juuuuuust a bit off-topic, but...
/.'ers are capable of bringing to the party.
With the inclusion of ECC in the new XServes, and Apple's slow-but-steady propogation of high-end features towards the lower end, how likely is it that we'll see ECC in some future rev (maybe even this alleged-real-soon-now bump) of the desktop G5s?
It's been many years since my computer architecture coursework, so I am not sure that there's even a real cost-benefit reason to do so. I look forward to reading any brilliant insights that
Theory and practice are the same in theory, but different in practice.
The fact that they are being sold by MacMall would kill the deal for me. I boycott spammers, and MacMall has been spamming for years.
how many clock cycles does that instruction take, though?
They wanted to place highly in the top 500. The top 500 runs in "sweeps," meaning they have to be up and running on the DATE when the results are calculated. I don't know how often the sweeps are run -- ever 6 months or year or so.
So they most certainly WERE in a hurry. Now they can swap them out for more space-efficient Xserve G5's (and maybe gain some more speed with the extra space).
OS X supports TCP/IP over firewire. Firewire has significantly lower latency than ethernet, and it's a shared bus.
So Apple's biotech clusters use FW800 as a large, shared bus for distributing work packets. It's like a "free" high speed low latency third ethernet port... great for shared high-speed communications.
$200 off a 6 month old used computer? You've got to be joking, right? You get that in rebates on most brand new computers these days.
This kind of shit is exactly why I have never bought from MacMall. They have the markup from hell. I'm surprised they can stay in business. The only thing I can figure is that the average Mac user is not computer saavy (i.e. not a Slashdot reader) and has no clue he's being overcharged 50-100%. Some Mac users out there explain to me why you frequent MacMall over the Apple Store or CompUSA?
As an aside, I would love someone to do an in-depth study and research the logic behind mail-in rebates (or, if it's been done, point me to it). I know we all have our ideas, but what is the real reason an online company like Dell or MacMall would sell you a computer and then have you send in a mail-in rebate?
Source
The MMX multiply and add instruction is PMADDWD. It takes 3 cycles on a PIII or Athlon and 8 on a P4.
--
Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
1. Buy computers from Apple at discounted price to create supercomputer.
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
And decides that instead of upgrading to x-serves, they're going to rip out the insides of ALL the G5s and replace them with dual xenon systems. Hell, why replace the cases when they're already all pretty-like?
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.
How many intelligence agencies are there worldwide? How many list their mainframes in the 500 list? What was the last time we knew about the exciting things people like the NSA and GCHQ were doing with computers? World War II. Now take how far ahead of academic computing they were in 1945 and add 50 years worth of Moore's law, Cold War and funky Russian mathematics geniuses.
I bet NSA has stuff that makes this look like a gameboy.
--
Before modding "troll", go look up the meaning of the words discussion, rhetorical and "devil's advocate".
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
Isn't a mere $200 discount a bit anemic for old, used equipment? Granted, less than a year old, but I sure couldn't sell last year's PC for that close to list. This also begs the question "Why were the V-Tech folks assembling a super computer using desktops when they could have waited a few months?". This sounds like how the gubmint works.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
That's an integer multiply-add. The PowerPC 970 can do a double-precision floating point multiple-add, and that is what the Opteron and P4 lack. They can get pretty decent throughput for this sort of thing using SSE2, but only about half of the throughput, clock for clock, that a PPC 970 can get.
Given that getting on the Top500 list seemed to the main goal of this system, and that list uses only the (very limited) Linpack benchmark which is essentially nothing but multiply-adds, this makes the PPC 970 a much better chip. Of course, for real-world code, the difference might not be nearly as large and in many situations the P4 or Opteron could easily be a lot faster.
Of course, one question that could easily come out of this is WHY doesn't SSE2 include a double-precision floating point multiply-add instruction? You would have to ask Intel about that one, because it seems like a natural instruction to have in SSE2 if you ask me. Even with the updated SSE3 they didn't add this.
In my experience the price of Macs depreciates far less with time than your standard x86 boxen.
First of all, buying a new Mac is generally expensive.
Secondly, Apple's computers are generally made with solid, high-quality components and last a long time.
I just sold a single-processor G4/450Mhz Sawtooth for $400 the other day: that's a 4 year old machine that cost about $2000 new, yet can still be sold at %20 of original price.
At least up to a week ago, you could buy a 'refurb' 512M dual 2.0 direct form Apple for $2,399. They're trying top move these guys along as it looks like the 90nm chips are on their way...
Apple is bringing the supercomputer title back to the USA
No. IBM is.
Interesting...
"So the Apple project at Virginia Tech may be a wonderful educational
project, but commercial customers who have less interest in experimentation are more likely to pay specialists at Linux Networx, RLX Technologies, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell or Hewlett-Packard to plan the plumbing, package the software and plug in the cables. And those companies aren't going to rely on Macs."
MacMall sucks. They are the single worst computer vendor I have ever dealt with. My last purchase resulted in them overcharging me by about $250, which they have yet to correct, dating to last October. It's a shame they are the vendor for this special deal, I'd never consider using them again at any price.
Of course, for real-world code, the difference might not be nearly as large and in many situations the P4 or Opteron could easily be a lot faster.
"real-world code" *is* multiply-adds, when we're talking about scientific computing (and why else would you need a 1,100-node cluster?)
Do you honestly think that EVERY scientific computing application is nothing but a bunch of multiply-adds? Sure, that's pretty much all you're going to do if you're just solving large matricies (admittedly a common task in HPC stuff), but this is definitely not the ONLY type of code out there.
It is, however, the only type of code that the Linpack benchmark uses.
Owning one of these would be kind of cool if that supercomputer has actually done important real work, but did they ever reach that stage, or are they still in testing and tuning mode?
Admit it, even those people who forget to mail in the rebates feel better about the purchase knowing that they're getting a price break. Its pretty standard stuff in marketing/advertising. Most companies where mail in rebates are common can tell you the industry redemption rates with a high degree of confidence x.xx% Its all about making your customer feel good about their purchase
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
As stupid as it may sound, does VT still have the right to claim their Supercomputer is in 3rd place? Before you start flaming me think about it. They have changed all teh hardware for "equivalent" hardware. Nothing tells us the XServes run any faster or Slower than the desktops. If the performance is anyhow different a new Inspector would need to validate the tests again. We all assume it should run the same and all, but technically the record is no longer valid as it is not the same computers! Anybody have some idea on the validity of their record now they have changed the machines? Heck if they even change the network design, performance might drop!
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Just called, no need to call.. they're all gone.. shucks.
-Jim
Right.... All along, this has been a mutually beneficial deal for both Apple and VA Tech. I guarantee Apple is giving VA Tech a special deal on this whole upgrade (and gave them a deal on the initial purchase too), because it's excellent publicity for them - and a chance to get real development on clustered computing going on the new G5 systems.
People saying VA Tech "should have just waited for the rack-mount version" don't get it. Apple made it worth their while not to wait, from the beginning....
How do you get the smell of cow manure off of it though??
Not every. But most. Solving ODE's usually boils down to iterating a (possibly implicit) linear system. Solving PDE's with finite differences does too. Or with finite elements. Or spectral methods. Lots of statistical computations do too.
Certainly there *are* scientific applications that don't involve multiply-adds, it's just that the vast bulk of scientific computations that are suitable for parallelization really boil down to solving linear systems, some kind of linear iteration, least-squares problems, or some combination. All of which are solved using lots of multiply-adds. So, while linpack isn't the end-all and be-all of hpc benchmarks, i'd say that it's a pretty good guideline; i'd also say that the speed of multiply-adds matters a whole hell of a lot for scientific computing.
what is the real reason an online company like Dell or MacMall would sell you a computer and then have you send in a mail-in rebate?
Psychology, the same reason stuff that costs $[x].00 is priced at $[x-1].95 or $[x-1].99.
Companies love rebates because then they can advertise the lower (post-rebate) price to draw you in, you'll pay the higher (pre-rebate) price to actually buy the item, and then you'll either forget to send in the stuff to get the rebate, or you'll be too lazy to do it, or they'll reject your claim if you don't follow the instructions exactly and send them everything they require to cut you a check-- then they get to keep that extra money. Even if you do go through the hassle of redeeming your rebates, it takes quite a while for them to get you your money-- and the whole time that money is earning interest for the seller.
I'd guess that 2/3 of people who buy stuff that qualifies for a mail-in rebate NEVER redeem the rebate, thus making it quite profitable for companies to offer them. You didn't think they just wanted to save you money, did you? Because if they just wanted to do that, they'd lower the price by $5 at the friggin' register instead of making your jump through hoops to get a $5 check two months after you've made the purchase.
~Philly
Ahhh, yes. I did fall victim to that. Nevertheless, with the memory, the price is lower than academic new machines.
So they can make money when people forget to send the form on time, or fill it in incorrectly.
Not only that, but anywhere from 1/2 to 1/3 of all the rebate applications get "automatically" rejected, and you get a "rebate declined" letter in the mail. Most folks will ignore the letter and toss it out because now it's 8 weeks after they bought the damn product and theyre irritated enough. Only a very small percentage will actually call back and complain about the declined rebate at which point the company will promptly mail you your check.
Yeah, it's basically a big scam.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
WHY doesn't SSE2 include a double-precision floating point multiply-add instruction?
Most instructions take two operands, but a multiply-add takes three, so you need an extra port on the register file and enough space in the instruction encoding to fit four register numbers. I'm not familiar with the specifics of SSE2, though.
:-) good point ac, and neither was I.
Does your woolly hat have a tin foil lining or does my tin foil hat have a woolly one?
I always thought it was get a more people to buy. By offering a rebate, the penny pinchers will buy from you and send in for the rebate. Some people, for whatever reason, are willing to pay more, and won't send in the rebate (lazy, stupid, too much money, whatever the reason). That way you make more money off of people willing to pay more, while still making some money off the people who aren't.