For many years now, Virginia Polytech has had an unusual relationship with the technology community; they have dabbled in requiring their students to use a host of unusual platforms and architectures, has done research using everything from NeXTSTEP to XP, and happily and without reservation supports use of Macs on their campus. An unsual beast.
So, no surprise that the unusual beast has unearthed one of the most unlikely children of the early part of the 21st century to date - as far as Supercomputing is concerned.
Apple has profiled the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University's new System X, lovingly referred to by some as Big Mac: The worlds third-fastest supercomputer, built from shiny, new, off-the-shelf G5 systems (1100 to be exact), was born in November of 2003.
System X is radically different from traditional, high-performance supercomputers. Unlike most, it is based on a "supercluster" of Power Mac G5 computers, each of which has 4GB of main memory, and 160GB of serial ATA storage. Not only is System X the world's fastest, most powerful "home-built" supercomputer, it quite possibly has the cheapest price/performance of any supercomputer on the TOP500 list.
A highly readable review of an amazing technical achievement. As more and more people need access to more and more computing power as a part of their daily work, logistical and developmental breakthroughs like this reduce the barrier to entry for low-end supercomputing-style computation clusters for the rest of us.
And that is something to get excited about - whether you're one of those people at the top who wants to see useful statistical correlations that tell you where your business is going, or one of those people at the bottom who's expected to crunch the numbers, computation clusters are more than just a wave of the future, they're a need of the present.
