Virginia Tech's G5 Supercomputing Cluster Faster Still, Back Up To #3

by , 4:30 PM EST, October 30th, 2003

Mac fans, Apple watchers, supercomputer users, and most of the rest of the tech and geek worlds have all been closely watching the grand experiment at Virginia Tech known as Big Mac. Big Mac is the university's US$5 million supercomputing cluster of 1,100 2 GHz dual-processor Power Mac G5s that seems likely to be ranked in the top 5 faster supercomputers in the world.

Earlier this month, we reported that it was possible that Big Mac might rank as world's second fastest supercomputer with a theoretical max of 17.6 TFlops of processing power. Such power would place it between NEC's Earth Simulator at 35.86 TFlops, and Los Alamos's ASCI Q at 13.88 TFlops. Preliminary testing, however, showed that Big Mac put out a mere 7.41 TFlops, still enough to rank the system at #4. As tuning a supercomputer takes time, a week later, Virignia Tech had boosted performance up to 8.164 TFlops, but today the news is that Big Mac is faster still.

Wired News is reporting that the team running Big Mac, headed by Srinidhi Varadarajan, has boosted performance for the system up to 9.55 TFlops, and that's enough to boost their ranking back up to the third fastest system in the world. That's not so bad for a solution that cost a fraction of what most supercomputers cost, but Mr. Varadarajan says his team can eke out still more power. From Wired News:

The latest semi-official numbers concerning the speed of Virginia Tech's "Big Mac" supercomputer rank it as the third-fastest machine on the planet. The system's architect, Srinidhi Varadarajan, said Tuesday evening that the newly completed supercomputer operates at 9.55 trillion operations a second, or 9.55 teraflops.

The number has been in flux in the last few weeks as Varadarajan tunes the system. Early numbers suggested the Big Mac was the world's second-fastest supercomputer. Asubsequent report dropped the machine to fourth place.

The latest test vaults Big Mac -- the first supercomputer made of Macs -- to the third slot among the world's Top 500 fastest machines, trailing Japan's Earth Simulator and Los Alamos National Laboratory's ASCI Q. The final rankings will be revealed in mid-November at the International Supercomputer Conference.

The latest number won't go lower, and may go even higher, Varadarajan said. System optimization is nearly finished, but "we still have a few more tricks," he said. "We're hoping for a 10 percent boost, hopefully shortly."

There's much more in the full article, and we recommend it as a very interesting read.

The Mac Observer Spin:

The article talks about some of the people who are watching this prooject, and if Mr, Varadarajan can get more than 10 TFlops out of his $5 million in hardware, you can bet that Apple will sell a lot more G5s to this market. A G5 Xserve will only serve to accelerate that, but we also see this development helping to legitimize Apple technology in IT departments, as well as the scientific world. Virginia Tech is showing that the Mac is for serious computing.

In short, this truly is one of the biggest things to happen to Apple and the Mac platform in years. Virginia Tech has brought enormous credibility to Apple, and we look forward to seeing the official rankings in November. Anything in the Top 5 will be good news.

Wired News Article