Sunday, July 27, 2008

Virginia Tech building supercomputer out of 324 Mac Pros

Virginia Tech's Center for High-End Computing System (CHECS) is famous for building a 1100-node, G5-based supercomputing cluster in 2003 called System X. At the time it was built, it ranked as the third fastest supercomputer in the world with a sustained performance of just over 12 teraflops. The CHECS is building a new cluster, this time using 324 Mac Pro towers, that will have a theoretical computing capacity of 29 teraflops. Varadarajan and his team chose Mac Pros for a few reasons. For one, Xserves are power dense, which requires a lot of cooling to prevent thermal hot spots. And, despite common wisdom to the contrary, the Mac Pros beat other systems on price. "The Mac Pros are highly competitive even against building a white box off the cheapest prices," he added.

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