Virginia Tech Upgrade: PowerMac G5 to Xserve G5

An anonymous reader writes "Virginia Tech officially announced that they will be migrating their G5 Supercomputer from PowerMac G5s to Xserves. According to the article, the Xserve G5s will reduce power consumption, heat production and decrease the system size by a factor of three. The pricing of the upgrade is still being determined, and according to Srinidhi Varadarajan, they are working on getting "very good homes" for the PowerMac G5s which will be replaced."

Upgrade cost

[Kris Thalamus]

Does anyone know what the university got in return for allowing Apple to film the installation and staff for the Xserve promotional videos? A reduced price upgrade may have been part of the initial agreement

Instead of going 3x smaller

[laurensv]

why not have a few more Xserves, I mean they already have the infrastructure for that much heat/power/room, so why don't they supersize the Big Mac?

Video Cards & Optical Drives

[BandwidthHog]

Now for all those people who droned on and on about how foolish VTech were for not getting stripped down boxes, here's the reason.

Motivation?

[Goose Bump]

Not a G5 expert here...

I wonder if there is a processing gain acievable by doing this or of the motivation is purely power dissipation and space. If so, at the end of the day it seems like the power bill delta over the usable life of the computer wouldn't make the expense of the upgrade worthwhile (especially considering VT has an on campus power plant of their own). Wouldn't it make more sense to wait around for the 'next best thing' instead of the same thing in a different package? If it ain't broke, why fix it?

But I guess they want a super-computer the football team can be proud of...

Re:I'll take one...

[bluekanoodle]

How is this Insightful? The Lead in stated the reasons as a less power consumption, less room needed, and less heat produced. Last I checked trying to save money on Electricity, Cooling and Floor space was simple good use of students tuition dollars.

Re:The Cost?

[AKnightCowboy]

Really, could they have not waited the 4 months to get their brand new shiney G5 based super-computer and not wasted so much money on all those G5 towers?

Waste what? From what I read they're just trading them in and Apple will sell them as used/refurbished units. They're probably getting a huge discount for the trade in of 4 month old machines, if they're paying anything at all. This is just a boost for Apple's marketing department to have a G5 cluster in one of the top supercomputer spots. What I never understood is why someone like IBM didn't come along and cluster 10,000 dual P4 nodes together for fun to get on the top spot. I'm sure they have the inventory to write that off.

Re:too soon to initial install

[nordicfrost]

It's not as much an upgrade ar it is a change of form factor. Besides, the cluster of G5s was spuuosed to be donated away when the real upgrade came anyway. This way, VA uni saves power, money and a slight upgrade in efficency of the cluster. And the G5s can be sold as top-notch computers. Not a bad deal if you ask me.

Re:Upgrade cost

[Kris Thalamus]

Still, unless Apple gave a substantial incentive, it seem extravagant to purchase 1100 G5s and the tower accommodating racks to house them, only to upgrade them a few months later.

Also, a savvy Slashdot reader, leaked the plans [slashdot.org] some time before the upgrade was officially announced.

Re:The Cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny. I thought the purpose of academia was advancing education and research, not adding to the marketing hype associated with technology. Thanks for clearing that up.

BTW, I'm a CS prof; spare me your lecture on modern academic realities. Annoucements of this type discourage me b/c it shows that many departments lack real technical depth and are forced to make up for that with marketing noise. Pity for the students and pity for the taxpayers.

Uh

[daveschroeder]

This was *more* than worth it for Virginia Tech, academically, scientifically, and economically.

They spent $5M to instantly catapult themselves to the forefront of high performance computing, which was successful. Now they're replacing the entire cluster with ECC on the cheap, and will be doing real work with it in no time. This is a coup for VT, plain and simple. No one will be #3 again on the Top 500 list for anything close to $5M anytime in the foreseeable future. (The Top 10 will soon be populated with even more $100M+ clusters.) Virginia Tech's gamble will pay off many more times over for Virginia Tech, the people of Virginia, and the federal taxpayers who helped pay for it. As you claim to be a professor (which I doubt), it surprises me that you're too dense to realize that. Remind me to steer clear of your "classes".

They became the #3 most powerful supercomputer site in the world, #2 in the US, and #1 in education - and the first academic site to break 10Tflops - for a pittance, and in accordance with all rules set forth by the Top 500 organization - and now can attract much more grant money to do even more research and become an even bigger contributor, instead of taking years and millions more dollars to do it.

The Top 500 list has always been about hype! Wake up! Bravo to Virginia Tech. The only "pity" here is that you're so ignorant and shortsighted.

Re:Upgrade cost

[the_2nd_coming]

all tehy got was an educational discount that is available to every institution.

the reason the college did what they did is so they can get into the top 5 on the super computer list, being there brings in lots of research grant money.

Old news

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that Steve Job's himself had already said this in his Macworld Keynote. An excerpt from someone's notes:

Jobs talks about the G5 processor and Virginia Tech SuperComputer, who wanted "the first" 1,100 dual-2GHz Power Mac G5s. ("We pissed off a few people" getting them the first ones.") Cost them only $5.2 million and sending ripples through Supercomputer world. Jobs shows Virginia Tech Supercomputer video. It uses Infiniband networking; it took less than 3 weeks to assemble. Now in the top 3 Supercomputers. First academic machine to break the 10 teraflop barrier. The entire system runs on Mac OS X. Jobs says he expects to see a few more [Supercomputers] popping up hear and there

So VT is probably going to be THE FIRST to recieve G5 Xserve's.

Re:Motivation?

[demise213]

Prestige, supercomputing power, and achievement aside, as a Virginia taxpayer I'm wondering why upgrade so soon. We have a huge budget shortfall this year and other educational programs (read: high school core learning programs) are taking it on the chin.

I'll admit I'm not an Apple fan, but I was glad to see VT take such an aggressive stance and build the Big Mac when they did. It did all the right things for all the right reasons...but why upgrade now? It's chic, but at the risk of sounding ultra-liberal, is it worth a few history and math teachers' jobs?

K

It's not what they call you, it's what you answer to.

Hardware monitoring

[Quila]

XServe has it, G5 doesn't.

Re:Motivation?

[unother]

I think you're looking at this backwards. The money used for this project was probably more or less grant/research money, e.g. not out of the state's general budget. As it is, the enhanced prestige from these successful projects will bring in scads of private cash to the uni, and thus will allow Virginia to push funds towards secondary and primary education, rather than VA Tech itself.

You should be happy, not concerned.

Re:A friend of mine had a great idea about this

[thatguywhoiam]

When it was first rumored that VT might replace its G5 boxes with Xserves, a friend of mine shared the idea that the pulled machines should be resold to the public, with some indication that they had been part of the cluster, perhaps a plaque or laser engraving noting that they had been included in the VT supercomputer.

That's a fantastic idea, and one that had occurred to me as well. The Mac people in particular would get a kick out of the 'historic' connotations.

I mean, look at the 20th anniversary Mac. It didn't even have enough RAM to run its own demo disc, but it looked like a Bang & Olufsen stereo so it's still considered 'cool'. (It did have the coolest Mac startup chime ever.)

Re:why?

[eggboard]

Space is finite, so reducing your space needs by 2/3rds and reducing your expensive air-conditioning budget by some amount is actually a huge argument in favor of upgrading. The Xserves are cheaper cycle for cycle than the Power Mac G5s, too.

The other issue: with 2/3rds of your space free, you can wait for faster G5s to appear and slot those in with very small amounts of disruption. Or a grant comes through for a $1,000,000 for more computers -- boom, you're done. No lengthy process of finding more space, spending more to build out a/c, etc.

Re:Instead of going 3x smaller

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a law of diminishing returns for clusters, adding 3x more machines may reduce it's efficiency to the point where the cost/benefit ratio is no longer viable.

Lack of Innovation, round two [Re:Well duh?]

[j.leidner]

... did Virginia not realize that 1100 full-size G5's might cause problems? ...
I've criticized the whole idea before, especially the hype around it, when I can't see any big new ideas happening.
Statements like The price of the upgrade has not yet settled on, but Varadarajan said it would be minimal compared to the cost of building a new supercomputer from scratch are just ridiculous, since why would you need to build a new multi-million supercomputer from scratch if you have never even used your brand-new "old" one? That's like saying "tearing down our just-completed new villa and building the new house another way will save us so much more compared to building the same one again the same way!"
As Pike (of UNIX fame) and -- more recently -- Jobbs have noted, there's not a lot of innovation going on anymore.
Having said this the Xserves are very nice designs, so if anywhere, the cup for cool ideas goes to industry (Apple's engineers), not academia (Virginia Tech) -- also in the second round.

Here's my proposal: Why don't the guy at VTech not build a new user interface that goes beyond the useful, but aged desktop metaphor that the Mac introduced to the masses twenty years ago? Or how about some serious study of automatic load balancing on the "old" supercomputer? They might "save even more" money by taking some time to learn from mistakes in the first round before diving blindly into the next generation of their Uber-Mac project.

(Sorry for the rant, but it seems such a waste of resources when not too far away people don't even have their jobs anymore.)

Re:Bad engineering?

[poemtree]

By the "guy in charge," I take it you mean Sirhindi Varadarajan. He has stated that he never used a Mac before VT bought this cluster, so your charge of his being an Apple zealot is false. Shame you can't just admit that the platform chosen was the best choice at the time, has worked out brilliantly, has changed opinions about Apple and the Mac, and is only going to get better on Xserves.

By blowing it off as Apple zealotry, you totally discount just how good the PowerPC 970 and the G5 architecture are.

Re:I'll take one...

[shotfeel]

Will they even be selling them?

I don't know anything about VT, but how many computer labs could benefit from new G5's?

How about other departments? Do they have a need/use for them? If nothing else, put them on faculty desktops.

Then there's always the possibility of reselling them to the current students.

Volunteers

[MacGod]

They should consider reselling them to the students who volunteered their time to help set up the Supercluster. I know they already got free pizza, but a discounted G5 would probably be extremely appreciated by most of them.

Re:a nice incentive

[Endive4Ever]

The people who get 'A' grades in courses consistently are often the people who nose along the syllabi as closely as possible. People who measure the success of the education in how well they digest and disgorge whatever limited scope of knowledge the professor decided upon.

When I was in tech school I wanted to know about the tech in general (I was already getting my A for the most part). People would groan in the lecture after I asked some particular question about electronics that went further than the course outline. Inevitably after I asked my question, someone else in class would ask 'is this going to be on the test?' and pencils would drop and people would stop paying attention for awhile.

People with 4.0 GPAs often are dandies or teacher's pets who have a hard time adapting to an unmanaged life in the real world. They do well in large corporations with layers of hierarchy where free study and unchanneled exploration are discouraged.