Factual 'Big Mac' Results

danigiri writes "Finally Varadarajan has put some hard facts on the speed of the VT 'Big Mac' G5 cluster. Undoubtedly after some weeks of tuning and optimization, the home-brewn supercluster is happily rolling around at 9.555 TFlops in LINPACK. The revelations were made by the parallel computing voodoo master himself at the O'Reilly Mac OS X conference. It seems they are expecting and additional 10% speed boost after some more tweaking. Srinidhi received standing ovations from the audience. Wired news is also running a cool news piece on it. Lots of juicy technical and cost details not revealed before. Myth dispelling redux: yes, VT paid full price, yes, it's running Mac OS X Jaguar (soon Panther), yes, errors in RAM are accounted for, Varadarajan was not an Apple fanboy in the least... read the articles for more booze."

FACT:

[Anonymous Coward]

Big Macs are bad for your health.

Take 12492342...

[devphaeton]

....ok, we've really got real numbers THIS time!!

Quite an accomplishment.

[illuminata]

I haven't seen a cluster of Macs this big and powerful since the last annual pimp convetion!

Now, where did all the tricks go?

Re:Full price

[MORTAR_COMBAT!]

The power usage (think cooling the room) for a similarly-performing Athlon cluster would likely more than make up for what phantom price difference you are talking about.

Favorite Quote

[Anonymous Coward]

An audience member asked if he'd made the purchase through the Apple store. Varadarajan smiled and said that actually, yes, he had.

No, make that..

[SuperBanana]

from the whole-lotta-clock-cycles dept.
[snip]
yes, it's running MacOSX Jaguar ( soon Panther)

More like whole-lotta-CD-jockying. Perhaps the bio department can lend a hand by donating the services of their chimps to handle the CD swapping.

(Yes, I'm aware there are smarter ways of doing it, but isn't it a fun mental picture, 100 chimps running around a cluster of G5's and throwing bananas and CDs at each other?) Talk about your fun install-fests.

Re:technical details? like this one...

[geoffspear]

Tell you what... you build a cluster of 32 bit machines connected with 100 Base T ethernet and come back and tell us how many more nodes you needed and what it cost you when you have one of the 5 fastest computers in the world.

Until then, quit your trolling.

Jumbled numbers

[SDMX]

'yes, errors in RAM are accounted for,' And no malloc library benchmark jumbling bullshit this time? T minus 10 minutes before some PC nut looks at all this, sees that the Mac relies on something a PC can't do, and 'blows the whistle'. T minus 15 minus before they realize it's the OS.

Re:Dumb Question...

[valkraider]

the nodes available for parallelized word

Does it make Word's performance acceptable?

Re:Super computer?

[isoga]

When you get on the list. Then you have a supercomputer

Re:Favorite Quote

[Glonoinha]

I can see that one now ... Varadarajan surfs to www.apple.com/purchase

Ok, max all the options. Cool.
Now put 1100 in the quantity. Cool.
Ok (chugga chugga chugga) $3.3 million dollars. Who has the credit card? (silence, *crickets*, the rude sound of nobody reaching for their wallet...)

Ok maybe it is just me. Of course I have play configured a few systems in the online order systems of IBM and Dell a few times (didn't actually hit 'Submit' however) and it is possible to configure a single $100k machine from Dell. I haven't found the limit at IBM yet as they seem to have more imagination than I do (although it is easy just to get the SOFTWARE on one of their systems to exceed $100k.)

nerds

[mooface]

From the wired article:

"After his presentation, a group of nerds followed him to the hotel's bar for drinks, hanging on his every word."

How dorky did these guys have to be to have a reporter for "Wired" catagorize them as nerds...damn....

When They Switch It to Linux

[Euphonious Coward]

Think how much faster it will be when they switch all the nodes over to Linux! :-)/2

Not a mac fan either...

[Epistax]

... but that doesn't matter. An accomplishment is an accomplishment. Besides if an AI manifests itself it'd be less likely to destroy the world and more likely to tell you that your white socks do not match your purple tie.

Executive Summary

[cosmo7]

For your convenience I've collected the main arguments people have made against the cluster:

• They got some special deal from Apple
  
• It's running Linux, not OS X
  
• Opterons would be faster and cheaper
  
• The guy in charge is some Mac zealot
  
• It isn't as fast as everyone expected
  
• Rockets would not work in outer space as there is no atmosphere to push against

Re:price

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, Microsoft should build in a spellchecker accessible from the right-click context menu when clicked inside any dialog box. This idea is clearly obvious, as I'm a well known idiot.

Re:FACT:

[beautiful_idiot]

better than WOPRs.

Re:Brewn?

[Anonymous Coward]

boxen is a completely legitimate old english plural:

ox -- oxen

box -- boxen

and it is a well known fact that the Canteruery Tale was writen with emacs.

Re:No, make that..

[Anonymous Coward]

100 chimps running around a cluster of G5's and throwing bananas and CDs at each other?

Just like a regular Mac User meeting.

Re:REAL men count in binary :)

[BorgCopyeditor]

2^1/2

Now, that's a real number.

Re:Brewn?

[dipipanone]

I strive daily to better master Shakespeare's and Snoop Doggy Dog's language

Ah. In that case, the word you were looking for was 'brizzled', MizzutherFizzucker.

Hope this helps.

Re:Simply amazing

[Monkey Angst]

I did my undergrad their... Phi Beta Kappa class of 2000.

<reads sentences again carefully and whimpers for America>

Re:Brewn?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretend I gave you the middle-finger gesture.