by , 10:10 AM EST, November 17th, 2006

Virginia Tech's System X, a cluster of 1,100 Apple Xserve computers, has surpassed the 15 million CPU-hour mark. The Apple/Infiniband cluster has been serving the high-end computing needs of campus faculty and students for several years.

Virginia Tech's Xserve/Infiniband Cluster.

Cal Ribbens, chair of the System X allocation committee and associate professor in the College of Engineering's Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, commented "System X has been a boon for Virginia Tech... Several new faculty members have been attracted to the university, in part, because of the new research computing capabilities. Ten of the projects allocated time on System X are led by faculty members who have been hired in the last three years."

System X was launched in November 2003, and was originally build with modified PowerMac G5 tower computers. Later, the towers were replaced with dual G5 processor Xserve computers. The cluster has achieved 12.25 teraflops, and is rated as one of the top computer clusters in the world.