by , 6:00 PM EDT, September 16th, 2004
Earlier this year, the US Army, in association with the COLSA Corporation, announced that it would use 1,566 Xserve G5 servers clustered together to create a new supercomputer to aid in the study of hypersonic flight. Now, Apple has posted a story about the completed system, called MACH5.
The new US$5.8 million supercomputing cluster is estimated to be able to crunch through numbers at a staggering rate of 25 trillion floating point calculation per second; which, if verified, would make MACH5 the second fastest supercomputer in the world. From Apple's article:
When the Hypersonic Missile Technology (HMT) team at COLSA Corporation and the U.S. Army need to model hypersonic flight on a computer system, they'll no longer have to wait two months to get results.
The HMT team, headed by senior scientist Dr. John Medeiros, now has access to one of the world's largest and most powerful computers: a supercluster of 1,566 64-bit, dual-processor Apple Xserve G5 servers.
Called MACH5 -- an acronym for Multiple Advanced Computers for Hypersonics -- the Apple cluster "gives us more than 60 times the computational power of our current production machine," says Medeiros. What used to take two months can now be done in a day. [...] At its peak, the supercluster can exceed 25 teraflops -- calculating more than 25 trillion floating-point operations per second. By comparison, the world's fastest computer -- NEC's $350 million Earth Simulator -- runs at a peak speed of 40 teraflops. A single person using a hand-held calculator -- without pausing to eat or sleep -- would need more than two million years to calculate what the Apple supercluster can calculate in a single second.
There's much more in the full article, which goes on to describe how the Army will use the new supercomputer, at Apple.com.
Back in 1999, when Apple debuted the Power Mac G4, the US military classified Apple's new computer as a supercomputer that could not be sold to certain foreign countries. The folks at 1 Infinite Loop then used that for a cheeky commercial depicting tanks surrounding a Power Mac G4, and calling the computer "a weapon."
The Power Mac G4 was able to do a billion floating point calculations a second, or 1 gigaflop. Today's Xserve G5s can push bits at more than 9 times the speed of the original Power Mac G4 (Linpack double precision floating point). If a single Power Mac G4 was considered a weapon, then a cluster of Xserves must be equal to a cruise missile with a 100 megaton warhead.
Be that as it may, what is interesting is that Apple has pretty much revitalized the demand for supercomputers by providing a low-cost alternative to what was traditionally an obscenely big ticket item. Now, universities, and departments in governments and businesses who could never afford to buy and maintain a supercomputer, can find the funding and manpower to run an Xserve cluster. This, in turn, is good for science, business, and ultimately for the average Joe and Jill who could benefit from the discoveries made possible by cheap, yet powerful computing.