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The article brings up an interesting question: What can we expect from Intel-based Xserves? I've not yet heard a single opinion regarding Intel in Xserve, despite the mountains of opinions that have been written on Intel-based laptops and desktops, new consumer electronic devices, and market share.

Well that's like a year and a half off. We don't usually hear too much about Apple products that far in advance!

If you remember there were photos of an Intel version of a Mac mini. Perhaps those were actually prototypes of Apple's new mac mini which may appear by Jan 2006 or sooner.

The CPUs used in the Apple systems are IBM products; shouldn't that factor into IBM's totals?

Apple ranked 14th! NOT 65th.. Hello anyone heard of proof reading?

Ranking List Rmax (GFlops)
14 06/2005 12250
7 11/2004 12250

the Apple G5 is an IBM product, that's 4 more spots for IBM?

"While IBM dominated the list with six of the top ten and 259 overall, Apple managed to score as high as number 65, occupied by Virginia Tech's System X, which features 1,100 2.3GHz Xserve G5 machines"

65?? Looks like the author of this article didn't look at the list very closely. Virginia Tech's System X placed 14, not 65! Another cruddy piece of reporting from the Mac Observer. Come on guys. If you can't get straight forward details like that correct why even bother? You lack of journalistic accuracy is frightening. No wonder the author didn't put his name on the article.

I took a look at the list and VT's System X is at 14.

How do expect to be taken seriously as journalists if you can not even get the most simple facts straight? This is why I rarely read the Mac Observer. How do you mix up 14 and 65?

Thanks for the correction notes, folks. The article has been updated to correctly note that the Virginia Tech cluster is #14 on the list, and not #65.

Bryan
Editor
TMO

Does anyone here have the tech knowledge to know whether the Virginia Tech software they developed to link their Mac cluster will work with Intel Macs, or could be easily ported? What made their cluster affordable was the ease with which they could put it together. It might give Intel a boost to have their chips in machines that can be that quickly and easily assembled into a cluster.

I go to VT and helped put System X together when it was the G5's and now XServes, but either way, one of the main components to SystemX is the InfiniBand networking that's used to transport all of the data. Personally, I really don't think there will be any problems if the directors of the project decided to move to Intel chips.
Apple has stated that everything that currently works on the PowerPC chips will also work on the Intel chips either due to Universal Binaries or they're underlying software that will simulate the PowerPC on the Intel chip. The only question then, is how fast the InfiniBand cards that are being used in the system, will get drivers to also work with Intel chips.

Quote

Apple has stated that everything that currently works on the PowerPC chips will also work on the Intel chips either due to Universal Binaries or they're underlying software that will simulate the PowerPC on the Intel chip

I can just see people queuing round the block to run their heavy numerical codes in emulation. The codes will still run because only a complete and utter fool would strongly tie their code to a particular OS. People stick to standards for a reason: so that they can write the code once, and then run on whatever hardware comes along. Universal binaries won't apply: these applications will not call the Cocoa layer, and everyone will compile specially for the cluster anyway.

In any event, as I've said before: the Top 500 list has all the meaning and sophistication of a spitting competition. Tell me what people are using the clusters to do, not about what benchmarks they can run.

Why wasn't that listed?

Why is'nt the COLSA MACH 5 listed? »www.apple.com/science/profiles/colsa/

Virginia Tech's "System X" Apple XServe supercomputer now ranks 14th among the top 500 in the world. The XServe cluster has 2200 processors in total, and was created in 2004. It ranks 9th overall in the United States. Nine of the thirteen supercomputers that rank above Virginia Tech's were created in 2005. The top ranked supercomputer is the BlueGene/L eServer Blue Gene Solution from IBM. It has around ten times the computing power of the Virginia Tech cluster. It includes 65,536 processors. Japan's famous Earth-Simulator supercomputer, which features 5120 processors, now ranks fourth overall. Three other Apple supercomputers made the top 500 list. Clusters at the University of Illinois, UCLA Plasma Physics Group, and Bowie State University tanked 66th, 162nd, and 166th, respectively.

http://www.top500.org/lists/plists.php?Y=2005&M=06

The Colsa MACH 5 built by Apple would be #2 on the top 500 list. So where is it?

http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/colsa/