New 640-Node Apple Xserve Cluster at UIUC
frostyboy writes "At the University of Illiois at Urbana-Champaign's Department of Computational Science and Engineering , a new high-performance computing cluster comprising 640 Dual G5 Xserves has completed benchmarking runs for the top500 list. The New Turing Cluster is a replacement for an old 208-node linux cluster. Preliminary results have it at about 4.6 teraflops, not too shabby. Slide Presentation and Photo Album"
Virginia Tech built the X cluster for around $5 million whereas the computers next to it on the top 500 list cost $20+ million.
Mellanox donated 1100 Infiniband adapters to Virginia Tech. At $3000 a piece, that's $3.3 million of interconnect hardware that Virginia Tech got for free.
Virginia tech can never be used as a cost comparison because they got so much stuff for free or discounted.