Apple Wins VT in Cost. vs. Performance

danigiri writes "Detailed notes about a presentation at Virginia Tech are posted by by an attending student. copied most of the slides of the facts presentation and wrote down their comments. He wrote some insightful notes and info snippets, like the fact that Apple gave the cheapest deal of machines with chassis, beating Dell, IBM, HP. They are definitely going to use some in-house fault-tolerance software to prevent the odd memory-bit error on such a bunch of non-error-tolerant RAM and any other hard or soft glitches. The G5 cluster will be accepting first apps around-November." mfago adds, "Apple beat Dell, IBM and others based on Cost vs. Performance alone, and it will run Mac OS X because 'there is not enough support for Linux.'"

Power concerns

[ProfessionalCookie]

I'm suprized not to find Power consumption/heat dissapation in the presentation. You'd think that the cost go running 1100 CPU 24/7 would be mentioned in there. Although it's likely that Apple would have wone that also.

Full operation by Jan 1 2004- that's cool.

Re:Clueless Sysadmins...

[bluethundr]

Aside from games, when is a high end graphics card needed for rendering and not just displaying a rendering

IANAS, but:

• Graphical representation of turbulance systems?
• Wheather analysis?
• Any graphical representation of Chaotic systems?

Like I said, IANAS, but there HAS to be a reason, methinks.

Re:Clueless Sysadmins...

[selderrr]

for any represantation, you need only 1 graphics card : the one the monitor is attached to. Parallelizing realtime display-only stuff is not much good since you'd lose to much time in data transmission.

So they could equip one G5 with a radeon9800 and let that one display the results. No need to buy another 1099 Radeons.

Re:Interesting

[Ster]

You misunderstand: it was hush-hush while Dell was exploring pricing options. Only after they came back with their lowest-price did Apple win the contract.

At least, that's the way I've been parsing it.

-Ster

Re:Why was bidding secret?

[Enrico Pulatzo]

Probably due to in small part to the G5 not being public at the time.

Re:For those in the know

[confused one]

Why go to the trouble of porting linux to the G5 when you could port the clustering code to OS X and be done with it. Seems like a much simpler task and more cost effective use of labor.

Re:Cost Analysis

[2nd Post!]

I bet at the time of initial consideration of vendors, there were no competitive Opteron or Itanium solutions (none with chassis, the slides say), and I am also willing to bet that Apple had at least a hardware prototype they could demonstrate, at least a motherboard + dual CPU setup, even if the chassis was incomplete and the not all the major subsystems were 100%

Just enough to demonstrate that Apple *would* have a solution, and enough that VT could narrow down the decision to a possible, pending the actual production and purchase of a single machine... then, the contract being 99% complete, they just had to sign a couple papers and purchase, overnight, 1,100 dual G5s.

On the flip side I bet they had a similar contract in the wings with other vendors, all pending on 'simple' bottlenecks.