Virginia Tech is building another Mac-based supercomputer, this time out of Mac Pros. According to ArsTechnica, Virginia Tech's Center for High-End Computing System is building a new cluster using 324 Mac Pro towers that will have a theoretical computing capacity of 29 teraflops.
The system will be used to study two main areas: power-aware software systems that can adjust performance automatically to maximize efficiency, and distributed shared memory systems that can run existing threaded code on high-performance clusters "as if they were scaled up versions of multi-core desktops."
Virginia Tech made headlines in 2003 when they assembled a cost-efficient supercomputer named System X out of Power Mac G5s. System X ranked as the third fastest supercomputer in the 22nd edition of the of the Top 500 list, performing at over 10 teraflops. The system was upgraded to 2.3 GHz Xserve G5s approximately a year later. Ars notes that if System X were to be upgraded to current generation Xserves, the result would be a "8800-core monster that could push as much as 100 Tflopsat least in theory coming close to Top 10 territory."
The school is using Mac Pros instead of Xserves because Xserves would require more robust cooling requirements; System X uses a hybrid liquid and forced air system whereas the Mac Pro cluster would only require a conventional air-cooled room. Also, the additional PCI Express 2.0 slots provided by the Mac Pro were deemed desirable for use in other research projects.
Correction: The System X cooling system is not located in a separate building.
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
