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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"

4 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sweet Dreams Steve by UnknowingFool · · Score: 4, Informative
    Anyone know what sort of crazy discount they get? It must be pretty good PR for apple.

    While it might be good for PR to give UIUC a discount so that they would buy the system, remember that the cost per performance is already low. Virginia Tech built the X cluster for around $5 million whereas the computers next to it on the top 500 list cost $20+ million. There may have been a deal, but given the price tag is already low, it may not have been much.

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  2. Re:Linux? by geoffspear · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Ah, Slashdot. Where people reply to people who haven't read the article with assumptions based on nothing in particular, but make it clear that the person replying hasn't read the article, either.

    It's running OS X.

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  3. Re:Linux? by Enrique1218 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Read the slide presentation. On pg 9, it shows a picture of Mac OSX at the terminal and on pg 16 it lists OSX under the software. However, linux will still operate the NFS server because Apple's implementation of NFS server only allows fifty clients. I am not sure whether a XServe or an old computer from the previous cluster will run it.

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  4. Anyone else... by Electroly · · Score: 5, Funny

    Anyone else getting sick of seeing all these stories with pictures of people assembling hundreds of Xserves into massive clusters?

    Yeah, me neither.