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Virginia Tech Supercomputer Ranks #4

The New York Times provides preliminary numbers for the fully assembled PowerMac G5 Cluster which Virginia Tech assembled this month.



The preliminary numbers rank the G5 Cluster as the 4th in the world in performance with 7.41 trillion operations per second (TFlops) . Official results will not be reported until November, and Tech reports that they are "still finalizing their results and that the final speed number might be significantly higher."



The relative cost of the entire assembly is significantly less then previous solutions.



The Top 5 Supercomputers as of June 2003 are listed here. The #1 computer comes in at 35.86 TFlops, #2 at 13.88 TFlops, #3 at 7.634 TFlops, #4 at 7.304 TFlops, #5 at 7.304 TFlops. At 7.41 TFlops, the PowerMac G5 Cluster should slip into 4th position... and is not very far from the #3 spot with these preliminary numbers.

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109 months ago
WOW.

That is a lot of operations per second.

Gotta like a Mac being number 4. Not quite number one, but 4 is nice, too.
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109 months ago
maybe 2nd?
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109 months ago
I heard on your mac life that it would be number 2 when it was all said and done.
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109 months ago
What happen to #2.
I guess it's still in top5
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109 months ago
The following article puts it on second place on the list:

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60821,00.html

The brand new "Big Mac" supercomputer at Virginia Tech could be the second most powerful supercomputer on the planet, according to preliminary numbers.

Early benchmarks of Virginia Tech's brand new supercomputer -- which is strung together from 1,100 dual-processor Power Mac G5s -- may vault the machine into second place in the rankings of the worlds' fastest supercomputers, second only to Japan's monstrously big and expensive Earth Simulator.

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.

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109 months ago
I wonder whether this number will become higher in the rankings when Panther comes around. Or is this one of those things purely measured by the processor itself?
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109 months ago
the number-4-baby department ? :) this is great news, cheap, ultra powerful, great time to be a mac user !!!
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109 months ago
This is great news :)
And it is running OS X. I wonder how many of the top 10 super computers are running Windows...
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109 months ago
Now that's fast.
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109 months ago

Originally posted by michael666
The following article puts it on second place on the list:

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60821,00.html


The Wired article has very preliminary numbers. The NYTimes article is more accurate.

I wouldn't assume the rank will change. I don't know the spread.

arn
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