A Thousand-Plus Macs Equal One Big Supercomputer

Answer: the world's cheapest and most interesting supercomputer.

That's the scene today at the central computing facility at Virginia Tech after the university linked 1100 G5's in a supercomputer this week. The school claims the $5.2 million installation is one-tenth the cost of any supercomputer architecture offering the same power.

"The Apple people were absolutely shocked when we told them we wanted 1100 G5s to build a supercomputer," says Srinidhi Varadarajan, assistant professor of computer science. "We had to send a team to Cupertino to convince Apple's top management that we were serious."

Although the G5's began arriving just a few weeks ago, Varadarajan is confident he will meet the Oct. 1 deadline for the University of Tennessee's annual supercomputing benchmarking test of the world's top supercomputer sites. And, he feels sure the installation will place somewhere in the top 10 sites.

The installation is a sort of homebuilt site using off-the-shelf components.

The installation had its origins when Varadarajan fell in love with IBM's 64-bit PowerPC 970 processor and its 2GHz speed and floating point capability. When he found it wouldn't be available for him until 2004, he turned to Apple which uses the microprocessor in its powerful G5 MAC.

Each node in the 1100 configuration has dual 970s as well as 4GB main memory and 160GB auxiliary storage. Virginia Tech is using Apple's OS.10. Mellanox Technologies supplied the InfiniBand cluster technology tying everything together in 10GB network speed. Cisco Systems supplies the secondary 2GB Gigabit Ethernet net. Custom air conditioning -- the 1100 nodes can get very hot -- was supplied by Emerson Network Power's Liebert division. More than 250 tons of water are reserved to cool the installation.

"We're essentially home free now," says Patricia Arvin, the university's assistant vice president for information systems and computing. "It isn't just that we have a powerful supercomputer at an amazingly low cost, but it's important how fast we built it. We had 165 faculty and students working around the clock for 10 days."

While the benchmarking challenge now is facing the University's staff, they take heart that it is a simple task compared to convincing Apple that its little MACs could form the basis of a powerful supercomputer.

This story courtesy of TechWeb.