Wednesday, March 30, 2005

... and people say that Macs are no good for serious stuff! Well, eat this!

Virginia Tech gained international honors for building the fastest supercomputer at any academic institution in the world. And they did it using Power Mac G5s. From that milestone, Virginia Tech has moved ahead again with System X, a new cluster using 1,100 Xserve G5s.

Ranking seventh in the Top 500 list of the world's most powerful computer systems, System X was built at a fifth of the cost of the second-least expensive system in the top 10.

"When we built the first supercomputer from Power Mac G5s, we proved that a radically-different communications technology could be used to create a large-scale computing platform," says Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, director of the university's Terascale Computing Facility and the system's lead designer.

"We're recognized for knowing how to build these terascale computing machines and with very good price performance. But the measure of the facility is the kind of science it produces."

... and did someone say that Macs are only used for graphics and video???

Computational Science Applications at Virginia Tech

Molecular modeling
Numerical algorithms and software for mathematics
Quantum chemistry
Molecular static and dynamics
Computational geophysics
Biophysics
Computational fluid dynamics
Air quality simulations
Computational biology
Plasma and gas physics
Weather prediction

Read the whole article: http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/vatech2/

Posted by BeanZ | Permalink: 1:38 PM |