Big Mac achieves around 14 TFlops with 128 Nodes

mzs writes "The Virginia Tech G5 cluster has achieved around 80% of its peak performance in preliminary Linpack testing with 128 nodes according to Jack Dongarra at the Top 500. "They're getting about 80 percent of the theoretical peak," Dongarra said. "If it holds, and it's unclear if it will, it has the potential to be the world's second most powerful machine." Typically getting 60% of peak in the Top 500 lists is quite good. If the Big Mac cluster achieves 60% of peak it would displace the 2,300 2.4 GHz Xeon cluster at LLNL for the number three spot on the current list."

nope...

[Durinia]

Title is wrong - they get 80% efficiency on 128 nodes. The 14 TFlops number is if that efficiency is held through the full size of the machine (2000+ processors).

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[47Ronin]

Time to replace the G4 icon with a G5 pic dont you think??

Like this for example > http://www.apple.com/g5processor/ [apple.com]

Re:nope...

[nate1138]

And that isn't very likely. The efficiency of large clusters drops with every node. Expect somewhere in the 60% range as a final efficiency. I think.

Re:What happened to the federal controls?

[bofkentucky]

Nukes, nukes, and more nukes
Testing/developing a nuke program is much easier on a supercomputer than attempting live tests like the USSR, USA, France, Red China, and the UK did back in the 40-70's. Infact, a test detonation by a "unknown" would be sufficent grounds for a beat down by those countries or your neighbors (see Israel vs. Iraq, 1981) India and Pakistan have been allowed nukes mainly as a local deterent to keep 1-2 billion people from dying in South-Central Asia in the Indo-Muslim war that has been brewing for 50 years .

Re:Thats one fast Mac

[SlamMan]

Try again. The VA cluster is running OSX, as seen here [technewsworld.com].

Re:Thats one fast Mac

[stevesliva]

This is tremendous advertising for apple, but what about clusters of Power4's and 5's? why wouldnt they out-perform this cluster?

See this list? [top500.org] See all the IBM p690 server systems? They're all running Power4 or Power4+. However, I don't know why they're slower. The PPC970 isn't quite the same as the Power4. Plus all those Power systems are running at 1.3Ghz.