Army Contractor To Build A 1566 Xserve Cluster

olePigeon (Wik) writes "MacCentral has an interesting article on a new computer cluster. From the article: 'Apple Computer Inc. will announce on Monday the sale of 1566 dual processor 1U rack-mount 64-bit Xserve G5 servers to COLSA Corp., which will be used to build what is expected to be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The US$5.8 million cluster will be used to model the complex aero-thermodynamics of hypersonic flight for the U.S. Army.'" alset_tech was one of the many readers to point to CNET's version of the story.

Comments

Artillery shells, rockets, bullets...

[Anonymous Coward]

And other things that go boom.

They pretty much all go pretty fast through the atmosphere.

Re:Why the Army?

[DAldredge]

Not everything that flys is an aircraft. Think bombs, not planes.

$5.8 M is peanuts, maybe even peanut dust

[green pizza]

>> "US$5.8 million"

$5.8 M is absolute peanuts in terms of US Military budgets. You can't even buy replacement engines for a KC-135 (of which there are hundreds in service for various tasks) for $5.8M.

This purchase is segment of a drop in the bucket. It won't even make a dent on the balance sheet. Cutbacks and low funding in other areas is a result of the net picture (stemming from policy and tradition...)

Just be glad they didn't buy $58.0 M worth of Cray X1 or SGI Altix gear.

Re:$5.8 M is peanuts, maybe even peanut dust

[kylemonger]

Not only do the wealthy fund the programs with their taxes, they also use the least government services.

Er, no. Government is what keeps society civil. Who has the most to lose if civilization breaks down, the guy living hand-to-mouth, owning little other than the clothes on his back and other depreciating assets, or the guy whose has land, stocks and intellectual property, assets that are worth little to nothing without government's ability to defend his ownership of them? Government might be keeping the poor guy alive but it is keeping the rich guy alive and rich.

Re:Better then real life testing

[BigFire]

Well, sometimes, the only way to know something, is to do it.

Re:Torn between...

[Moofie]

The only solution to a violent world is to be better at violence than your neighbors.

There are zero societies on Earth that do not hew to this axiom.

1556 ????

[IamGarageGuy 2]

Not sure if this is a stupid question - but why 1556. It seems like a rather odd number. Is it budget or does this number of nodes work?

Re:I don't follow the numbers

[laird]

"Had you read the article you would have known that thr Army machine is connected using standard gigabit ehternet whereas the Big Mac used Infiniband."

GigE is about 10x slower (for this type of networking, see http://www.infinicon.com/pdf/LSTCUG-2003-Final.pdf ) than Infiniband. That is, unless there's some sort of magic router involved, I don't see how GigE would make CPU's faster.

Perhaps they're measuring different applications, and the Army machine doesn't need much communications? Kinda an odd way to benchmark...

Cozzano

[crumbz]

COLSA is too similar to Cozzano from Interface by Stephen Bury aka Neil Stephenson for my liking. This is a great time to re-read that book.

Re:Torn between...

[Usquebaugh]

Bollocks. Switzeland, Iceland have a different way.

Of course if you see violence as a solution then I guess thinking might be a bit of a novel concept.

Switzerland and Iceland chose military strength.

[ArsSineArtificio]

Bollocks. Switzeland, Iceland have a different way.

Switzerland's way is... being better at violence than its neighbors. That's how it stayed neutral in the Second World War - even Hitler was afraid to invade the great mountain fortress.

Iceland's way is... being better at violence than its neighbors. It opted to join the most powerful military alliance in the world.