Virginia Tech G5 Super Computer

Check out this link : http://www.bbcworld.com/content/template_clickonline.asp?pageid=666&co_pageid=3

There is an .asf video there of the Virginia Tech G5 Supercomputer, as well as some people using it.

I could only get the video to work. I tried both VLC and WMP, and they both bombed on the sound. The video is still cool though

Let me know if you get this with audio, so I can see the wholte thing without having to revert to my Win2K box

Nice!!!

thats pretty sweet

Yeah, im very proud to be a hokie. The supercomputer ranking currently puts us between 2 and 3 for the top supercomputers in the world, at 17.6 teraflops.

G5 supercomputer could be 2nd fastest in world

Source: MacMinute.com

G5 supercomputer could be 2nd fastest in world
October 15, 2003 - 10:35 EDT Wired reports that Virginia Tech's "Big Mac" supercomputer cluster, which uses 1,100 Power Mac G5s, could be the second most powerful supercomputer on the planet, according to preliminary numbers. "The Big Mac's final score on the Linpack Benchmark won't be officially revealed until Nov. 17, when the rankings of the Top 500 supercomputer sites are made known at the International Supercomputer Conference. But Jack Dongarra, one of the compilers of a Top 500 list, said Tuesday that preliminary numbers submitted to him suggest Big Mac could be ranked as high as second place... The Big Mac's theoretical peak is 17.6 teraflops, which would easily put it in second place behind Japan's Earth Simulator, a monster machine composed of more than 5,000 processors operating at 35.6 trillion calculations per second."

My Comments: Looks like hokiethang knew this before even MacMinute!

Murlyn said:

Source: MacMinute.com

G5 supercomputer could be 2nd fastest in world
October 15, 2003 - 10:35 EDT Wired reports that Virginia Tech's "Big Mac" supercomputer cluster, which uses 1,100 Power Mac G5s, could be the second most powerful supercomputer on the planet, according to preliminary numbers. "The Big Mac's final score on the Linpack Benchmark won't be officially revealed until Nov. 17, when the rankings of the Top 500 supercomputer sites are made known at the International Supercomputer Conference. But Jack Dongarra, one of the compilers of a Top 500 list, said Tuesday that preliminary numbers submitted to him suggest Big Mac could be ranked as high as second place... The Big Mac's theoretical peak is 17.6 teraflops, which would easily put it in second place behind Japan's Earth Simulator, a monster machine composed of more than 5,000 processors operating at 35.6 trillion calculations per second."

My Comments: Looks like hokiethang knew this before even MacMinute!

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I love being in CS :-D. They told us the theoretical information last week, we hope to have the actual numbers before the 17th though. I will see what i can find out :-D

That is soooo awesome. I wish I could be involved with stuff like this.

dziner said:

That is soooo awesome. I wish I could be involved with stuff like this.

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Im taking parallel computing as soon as i can :-D. It looks like the actual machine is going to run at about 14 - 15 TeraFlops. This was projected from a sampling of the 140 nodes that are online at the moment (and scaled to fit the entire system), which would put it at #2 on the world supercomputer list.

G5 supercomputer expected to be ranked 4th in world

Source: MacMinute.com

G5 supercomputer expected to be ranked 4th in world
October 22, 2003 - 11:20 EDT Virginia Tech's new supercomputer cluster, built from 1,100 Power Mac G5s, could be ranked fourth in the world, according to Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the list of the world's 500 fastest machines. "The official results for the ranking will not be reported until next month at a supercomputer industry event," the New York Times reports. "But the Apple-based supercomputer, which is powered by 2,200 IBM microprocessors, was able to compute at 7.41 trillion operations a second, a speed surpassed by only three other ultra-fast computers." Officials at Virginia Tech said they were still finalizing results and that the final speed number might be significantly higher.

My Comments: Well top 4 is still really kewl Now how come we didnt find this out first? Huh hokiethang?

Murlyn said:

Source: MacMinute.com

G5 supercomputer expected to be ranked 4th in world
October 22, 2003 - 11:20 EDT Virginia Tech's new supercomputer cluster, built from 1,100 Power Mac G5s, could be ranked fourth in the world, according to Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the list of the world's 500 fastest machines. "The official results for the ranking will not be reported until next month at a supercomputer industry event," the New York Times reports. "But the Apple-based supercomputer, which is powered by 2,200 IBM microprocessors, was able to compute at 7.41 trillion operations a second, a speed surpassed by only three other ultra-fast computers." Officials at Virginia Tech said they were still finalizing results and that the final speed number might be significantly higher.

My Comments: Well top 4 is still really kewl Now how come we didnt find this out first? Huh hokiethang?

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hey, some things get by me, im keeping my ear to the ground for my mac-forums team. The actual estimates i have heard put it a bit higher than 7.41 tflops, but a bit higher, but we will have to see what the final numbers are going to be. Right now the only hard numbers i have are 14.6 teraflops with 128 nodes up and running but that was a couple of weeks ago. I will keep my eyes peeled for more info :-D Im just as excited about this as I know most everyone else in the mac world is, now if i could only get my copy of panther any faster :-\

Virginia Tech Supercompuer - Now at #3?

Source: MacRumors.com

Virginia Tech Supercompuer - Now at #3?
MacBidouille links to an interim update on Supercomputer rankings (pdf - Page 53).

The latest results give the Virginia Tech G5 Cluster (2,112 Processors) a score of 9.5 TFlops. Previous preliminary results placed the G5 Cluster at 7.41 TFlops which placed it at 4th place.

The new score of 9.5 TFlops overtakes a Linux 2,304 Processor Intel Xeon cluster from last years list along with what appears to be some new entries this year (see PDF list).

Again, these are still preliminary numbers. Official numbers to be released in November.

Hmmm, who's winning the race now?

Less processors, and more power. Sounds like Apple is in the lead, if you keep track of that sort of thing...

And this is undoubtably happening with a NON 64Bit optimized kernel. I could be wrong.

If you'd like to see some JPEGS of it, check this out:
http://tartarus.uwa.edu.au/~trs80/Terascale/

registar said:

If you'd like to see some JPEGS of it, check this out:
http://tartarus.uwa.edu.au/~trs80/Terascale/

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just to let you all know, there is nothing new posted to that site, that i havent already posted around here somewhere. I am hoping to get a tour of the facility soon, so I will try to bring my camera and take a few shots.

Confessions of the world's largest Switcher?

Source: MacMinute.com

Confessions of the world's largest Switcher?
October 30, 2003 - 00:25 EST In writing for O'Reilly's MacDevCenter, Daniel Steinberg notes that Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan would make for an excellent Switcher spokesperson for Apple. Steinberg writes, "His ad might go something like this. 'I was in the market for a new machine. I was hoping to get ten teraflops by the end of the year. I'd never used a Mac and had been looking at Dells and IBMs. Then Apple released the G5 on June 23. A week later I bought 1,100 duals online at the Apple Store. I'm Srinidhi Varadarajan and I build Supercomputers at Virginia Tech (see related stories).'" Dr. Varadarajan received a standing ovation at his presentation at the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference, which wraps up today.

My Comments: Wow.. I would call him a very large switcher

That is great

Varadarajan said that they are getting requests for clones. "Expect to see a lot more G5 clusters."

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That is very cool for Apple, and us as their missionaries...

This is a very cool read : http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/28/2357235

How did use the G5 instead of the Opteron or Itanium?


Both are fairly nice, but they're expensive. First, it didn't pass the price/performance ratio test. Opteron doesn't do what the G5 does. 4Gflops at peak, the G5 is twice that. The Itanium is phenomenally efficient, but only at 1.5Ghz, not the 2Ghz. The #4 is a 8.6Terafllop Itanium II cluster (on 2000 procs)

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That's from the guy that Team Lead-ed the project. Very cool.

There's a lot of interest in departmental clusters, Is there documentation anywhere?


We hope to put up a full fledged package to duplicate this from 64 nodes and above. They hope to see many after this one.

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You know Steve was just like "Yes!" when he heard this. Imagine the future where every business makes a conscious decision to buy an Apple "Super Computer" as their solution for a redundant, data strorage, communication, and application server. Wow, anybody want to start a new company? Drop a T1 ( or 2 ) in your office with an 8 node G5 "Super Computer" and you'd have all the power you'd need to operate a small 100 person enterprise for quite a while down the road



That also includes 2TB of combined storage

For $30K you could have an 8-node Apple "Super Computer" all connected with gigabit ethernet, and a router to jack into the net. Oh yeah, all Cisco stuff too

Man, I'm gonna take out a second mortgage I think...

EDIT: The closest a Dell could get to this, was with dual Xeon 2GHz, same configuration, same router and switches, etc, totalled at $56K. Almost double that of an Apple solution...

Wow.. rock on! And you know that Apple gave them some sort of deal.. well so would Dell, but apparently not as good since they went with Apple