Earth Simulator, G5 Cluster Drop In 'Top 500' List

daveschroeder writes "The November Top 500 supercomputer list has been published at SC2004. Topping the charts is IBM and the US Department of Energy's 'BlueGene/L DD2' beta system, at 70.72 TFlops, followed by NASA's 'Columbia' at 51.87.TFlops. For the first time in several publications of this list, Japan's Earth Simulator is no longer in the number one slot, falling to third. Virginia Tech's 'System X' Xserve G5 cluster, while 20% faster than the original cluster that debuted at number 3 last November, has fallen to number 7 due to the new entries, but remains the fastest supercomputer at an academic institution. Here's an excellent cost comparison (Google cache) of the top machines ('System X' is significantly cheaper than anything else in the top 20, not to mention cheaper than many things far below it in performance)."

Comments

what if...

[Suburbanpride]

They made a beowulf cluster of all the top 10?

Re:cluster operating system

[dretay]

Yah its not like Apple dominates the MP3 market or is the most widely-distributed UNIX-based operating system http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/unix/or is reccomended as the safest OS http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/02/172 2237&tid=172&tid=179&tid=190

Seriously, everyone seems determined to put Apple down when they are in fact producing quality products.

What i really like is

[imsabbel]

How MACItiots who are like "Macs arent overpriced, you are paying for quality, users of pcs are people who cant spent money for a real computer",ect for years now all unisolo see the virtues of the cheap mac clusters and how they are better than everything because they are so CHEAP.
Well, a good answer would be using their own argument against them: Who buys MAC-clusters buys CHEAP, who buys power5/itanium/opteron clusters buys premium quality...