Own a Piece of An Apple-Based Supercomputer 296
Graff writes "Now that Apple has come out with the Xserve G5, Virginia Tech has been swapping out parts of their 'System X' supercomputer for the more compact 1U Xserves. MacMall is selling some of those System X component G5 systems with an approximate $200 savings and an extra 512 megs of RAM over a normal G5. You can read more about it at MacCentral."
first dibs (Score:3, Funny)
Proof? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Proof? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Proof? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Proof? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Proof? (Score:2)
Re:Proof? (Score:3, Funny)
Some of us *should* be bitter about this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Some of us *should* be bitter about this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Some of us *should* be bitter about this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Some of us *should* be bitter about this... (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot one (Score:5, Interesting)
ECC? (was: You forgot one) (Score:3, Interesting)
With the inclusion of ECC in the new XServes, and Apple's slow-but-steady propogation of high-end features towards the lower end, how likely is it that we'll see ECC in some future rev (maybe even this alleged-real-soon-now bump) of the desktop G5s?
It's been many years since my computer architecture coursework, so I am not sure that there's even a real cost-benefit reason to do so. I look forward to reading any brilliant insights that
Re:ECC? (was: You forgot one) (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't anticipate that Apple will sell any desktop G5's with ECC memory installed at the factory, but if the memory controller supports ECC you could easily replace the factory memory with third-party ECC memory.
Re:Some of us *should* be bitter about this... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll admit that a 6-month replacement cycle is pretty short, but it actually makes sense because they're avoiding the worst of the depreciation. I'm not up on used Mac prices, but x86 server hardware depreciates around 50% per year (refurbished 2 year old x86 servers routinely sell for around 20% - 30% of their original price; refurbished 3 year old gear sells for well under 10% of it's original price. You can get a maxed out Quad processor P-III server for well under $5000 which cost $50K when new.
That said, I don't think that this is a good deal. $200 savings on a $3000 box is only a 6.7% discount for 6 month old hardware; a 20% - 25% discount would be more in line with current market.
Re:Some of us *should* be bitter about this... (Score:2, Informative)
But yeah, they could have cut a better deal.
Depreciation (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, buying a new Mac is generally expensive.
Secondly, Apple's computers are generally made with solid, high-quality components and last a long time.
I just sold a single-processor G4/450Mhz Sawtooth for $400 the other day: that's a 4 year old machine that cost about $2000 new, yet can still be sold at %20 of original price.
Re:Some of us *should* be bitter about this... (Score:5, Informative)
Most computers fail either in the first month or so of use or after many years of good use. In the first case it's usually a bad component that slipped by quality control. In the latter it is simply the ravages of time. Longer quality control "burn-in" times would eliminate many of those first month failures, but the vendor really doesn't have the time/space for long burn-ins.
Now, the Number One way to shorten the life of your computer is to turn it on and off frequently. The computer heats up when you run it and cools when it's off. The expansion and contraction of components associated with these temperature changes stresses every solder joint on every component -- and may even stress the chip-level components themselves. To lengthen the life of your hardware (at the cost of extra electricity), leave your system on unless you aren't going to be using it for a significant length of time (i.e.: don't power cycle more than once a day).
These G5's have been on for approximately six months straight in a very well-controlled temperature environment. This is a burn-in that virtually guarantees that there were no manufacturing defects. However, since they weren't power-cycling on a regular basis, it was actually a VERY low-stress environment.
Re:Some of us *should* be bitter about this... (Score:2)
They did need them that badly or it wouldn't have qualified in time to make the list.
Re:Some of us *should* be bitter about this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Some of us *should* be bitter about this... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Some of us *should* be bitter about this... (Score:2)
Re:Some of us *should* be bitter about this... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm fairly sure Virginia Tech wanted the 1u cases all along (makes more sense). However, they needed the cluster up in time to make the Top 100 list. Being on that list brings in _lots_ of research money. So yes, they did need them.
Re:Some of us *should* be bitter about this... (Score:2, Informative)
Six weeks? VT neeeded 1100 machines. Apple shipped 220 000 G5s the first quarter. 0.5% of all machines went to VT. That ammounts to appoximately half a day of delivery delays.
Re:Some of us *should* be bitter about this... (Score:3, Insightful)
It grates on people being told that they're less important than a PR move.
They did need them badly (Score:2)
So they most certainly WERE in a hurry. Now they can swap them out for more space-efficient Xserve G5's (and maybe gain some more speed with the extra space).
PCI-X (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:PCI-X (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe that the Apple recommended restore procedure for an XServe involves booking from a copy of the OS installed on your iPod (which connects via FireWire).
You're more likely to back up onto tape.
There's no reason why you can't plug the tape drive in over FireWire. FireWire is basically a serial variant SCSI (okay, I'm oversimplifying a bit here) and with speeds of up to 800Mb/s it's fast enough for most things. You probably wouldn't want to connect your RAID array via FireWire, but for backups it's plenty fast enough. Many tape drives only let you write at Oh, and by the way the G5 units they are selling are intended as workstations not as servers (hence the digital audio out and the Radeon 9600 Pro, neither of which is really required for a server).
Re:PCI-X (Score:5, Informative)
Re:PCI-X (Score:3, Informative)
Re:PCI-X (Score:2)
Re:PCI-X (Score:4, Informative)
Nope. 3200 Mbits/s / 8 == 400 MByte/s.
1394b supports 800 Mbit/s over cat5, 1600 Mbit/s over poly-fiber, and 3200 Mbit/s over glass-fiber. Grandparent was right.
-T
Re:PCI-X (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually there are lots of reasons to include firewire on a server.
- You can hang a firewire mass storage device off of it to backup (tape, disk, etc), boot from (recovery, etc), add extra storage in a pinch, etc.
- You can create various types of clusters using firewire. One product is the sancube.
- It's cheaper to design in a feature that may not be used in one incarnation of a product, but may be usable in others. Case in point your comment about Audigy sound cards on high end Intel servers, those very same motherboards are probably used in both servers and high end workstations, no point in having two different motherboards just to save a few pennies off of a $500+ mobo.
Re:PCI-X (Score:4, Informative)
It's available in Mac OS and Linux.
http://www.homenethelp.com/network/firewire.asp
400mbps isn't to be sneezed at. With repeaters it'd probably make a decent fail-over network in case the main gigabit link failed.
Re:PCI-X (Score:3, Informative)
There's a very important use for firewire... (Score:3, Informative)
So Apple's biotech clusters use FW800 as a large, shared bus for distributing work packets. It's like a "free" high speed low latency third ethernet port... great for shared high-speed communications.
WOAH! Hold yourself up a second! (Score:3, Funny)
My question is: (Score:3, Interesting)
Did the Xserve get any benefit from the optimization of the Big Mac?
Is Virginia Tech going to lose money on this deal?
Re:My question is: (Score:5, Informative)
The G5 was the clear winner out of all the chips on the market, and Apple was the clear winner of the platforms considered, and they considered *ALL* of them worth considering.
The success of the venture simply proves the superiority of keeping an open mind and not bringing tired old pre-conceptions (Apple's slow, Apple sux, etc.) to your work.
Re:My question is: (Score:2, Informative)
A lot of the compares are done using 32 bit chips as well. Well, thats *not* a fair deal, is it? If you take a store-bought dual opteron with a AGP port and throw in all the costs of the software (the entire iLife 04 plus I got the FULL version of Quickbooks 5 preloade
Re:My question is: (Score:3, Interesting)
Whether something is "cheap" or "expensive" depends on the value of the product to the buyer. You can buy an acre of land for $1M and say it's cheap, or ten acres for $100,000 and call it expensive, depending on where the land is and what you need it for.
The point is, people who say Apple computers are ex
Re:My question is: (Score:5, Interesting)
Bottom line... if you're the kind of person who feels Apple hardware is overpriced because you can't assemble it yourself and run Linux on it, then you're missing the point and Apple probably doesn't want your business anyways. It's not outright stupidity that has kept Apple out low-end market all these years... it's a market they've intentionally chosen not to enter. Case in point.... Steve Jobs killed the whole Macintosh clone market when he returned to power at Apple. UMAX and PowerComputing were offering faster machines for less money, but were totally clueless when it came to delivering any value-add on the end-user experience.
I'm not saying this is in a "snob" context... it's just the reality of their business model. Apple wants to sell a G5 (or iMac or PowerBook) to somebody who -doesn't- want to assemble their machine. The whole point of the Macintosh is in the fact that you don't need to do any of that.
Take heart though... IBM is apparently going to be (or already is) selling 970 (G5) based systems in some form running some flavor of Linux... so if it's only the bad-ass CPU you're after there will be other ways of getting your little flippers on them.
Re:My question is: (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't understand this statement. Because it's proprietary it's not overpriced? I agree with you statements about Macs being engineered toward the high-end, everything in the box type of people but I don't see where that means they aren't expensive. They ARE overpriced... but people buy Cadillac Escalades all the time as well.
On a seperate note, I DO feel price is a barrier
Re:My question is:, MAC (Score:2)
Re:My question is:, MAC (Score:4, Informative)
Given that getting on the Top500 list seemed to the main goal of this system, and that list uses only the (very limited) Linpack benchmark which is essentially nothing but multiply-adds, this makes the PPC 970 a much better chip. Of course, for real-world code, the difference might not be nearly as large and in many situations the P4 or Opteron could easily be a lot faster.
Of course, one question that could easily come out of this is WHY doesn't SSE2 include a double-precision floating point multiply-add instruction? You would have to ask Intel about that one, because it seems like a natural instruction to have in SSE2 if you ask me. Even with the updated SSE3 they didn't add this.
Re:My question is:, MAC (Score:3, Informative)
Most instructions take two operands, but a multiply-add takes three, so you need an extra port on the register file and enough space in the instruction encoding to fit four register numbers. I'm not familiar with the specifics of SSE2, though.
Re:My question is:, MAC (Score:4, Informative)
Not every. But most. Solving ODE's usually boils down to iterating a (possibly implicit) linear system. Solving PDE's with finite differences does too. Or with finite elements. Or spectral methods. Lots of statistical computations do too.
Certainly there *are* scientific applications that don't involve multiply-adds, it's just that the vast bulk of scientific computations that are suitable for parallelization really boil down to solving linear systems, some kind of linear iteration, least-squares problems, or some combination. All of which are solved using lots of multiply-adds. So, while linpack isn't the end-all and be-all of hpc benchmarks, i'd say that it's a pretty good guideline; i'd also say that the speed of multiply-adds matters a whole hell of a lot for scientific computing.
Re:My question is: (Score:2)
Seems like no discount (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone else noted, if they were engraved or etched or something that would make them special.
You have truly no heart (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You have truly no heart (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Seems like no discount (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Seems like no discount (Score:2)
These come with 1 gig of RAM, so compared to the educational price it's just about a wash. The difference is that these systems are being sold to the general public, who would normally have to pay $2995 for these machines. That's a savings of around $200 with a bonus of 512 megs more RAM.
Re:Seems like no discount (Score:4, Insightful)
Honesty/Intregrity can mean paying list price sometimes.
Re:Seems like no discount (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Seems like no discount (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe, but it seems like most people have a pretty flexible view of where the cutoff line is. For example, would you pay sales tax for inter-state purchases where it was not billed as part of the transaction? You are supposed to, but virtually noone does.
Many people would consider paying for a product, but trying to get the best possible price, completely fine. Whether this means rebates, or any possible discount you can get.
After all, it's just a company's arbitrary decision on who gets discounts
Re:Seems like no discount (Score:2)
But, you can't "customize" one with a larger HD if you don't buy directly from Apple, so it was still worth it, despite all of the deals the other companies were running at the time.
Still, that whole sales tax thing fucked me over, because it brought the total over the limit of my credit card
So, why did the sale happen so early? (Score:4, Insightful)
my bet is... they could.
no one likes building any cluster (not to mention a supercomputer) out of desktops, esp. ones configured like desktops (gfx, no ecc,
but apple really wanted the PR of having the computer cluster, and perhaps to list the revenue in 4Q2003.
so i can't blame them - looks like a fair deal.
Re:So, why did the sale happen so early? (Score:4, Insightful)
No VT needed the PR probably more then Apple now they get grant money out the wazoo
Re:So, why did the sale happen so early? (Score:5, Interesting)
Please don't begrudge us this. Virginia's state legislature has cut over 28% from our 2002 level of funding, while just recently passing laws which effectively cap tuition hikes at about 5% per year. My tuition has gone from $1500/semester (2001 in state) to almost $2200/semester (2004 in state).
And please don't respond with "blah blah, if they used the money more effectively". We're up against the wall here. About 5 professors in my department (History) out of 25 or so have been laid off, or sent on research sabbatical so that they don't have to be paid. We've fired over 1/2 of the maintenance staff, and people on campus no longer have trash cans in their dorm hallways - they have to take their trash outside to a dumpster. The snow trucks in Blacksburg have far less salt than they had last year to clear the roads (I only think of this as I sit here at Netmar and watch today's 3 inches of snow fall). I now this isn't grave hardship, but seriously, we've cut about everything we can.
The supercompuer gives us both grants and positive PR. Students see that, despite the state of the economy, we're trying to push to the top of research institutes. We're trying to push ourselves above 67th (or whatever) on that college engineering school ratings, trying to compete with our neighbor down interstate 64, who, for no discernable reason, has an engineering program with the inflated ranking of ~ 15th. And yes, we get grants from the government and money from private industry in exchange for timesharing on the bigmac.
Just let this one go. We need the money, the BigMac has not only made us money, but has raised awareness of the university. It's a good thing.
~Will
Re:So, why did the sale happen so early? (Score:2)
BTW, Funny, Insightful, and Troll? I must be good or something.
Re:So, why did the sale happen so early? (Score:4, Insightful)
You fool. Apple wanted the PR, so they forced the G5s down VT's collective throat. Yeah, right.
Why couldn't VT hold their horses?
Because they had a deadline to meet if they wanted to make that Top CPUs list.
Top 500 list (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess is that both they and Apple wanted to have a spot on the last Top 500 list [top500.org], with all the associated press at the Supercomputing 2003 [sc2003.org] conference. Apple's been trying to convince somebody, anybody to build a large HPC cluster with their hardware since the G3 came out. Until the G5 came out, it made very little sense economically -- the per-system price for Apple kit was 30-40% more than comparable Intel-based stuff, and the memory bandwidth and 64-bit floating point performance was the same or worse. The G5 fixed that, for the most part
Nobody in their right mind wants to build a cluster out of machines in desktop/deskside chasses. We've done it once, with the first generation Itanium systems where there was no rackmount option for a 2-way box, and we'll never do it again -- remote management of those machines was and is actively painful. (Our 1st-gen Itanium cluster is out of production service now, but it's been partitioned up into smaller clusters at universities around the state as part of the Cluster Ohio project [clusterohio.org], which we still manage.)
Never buy 1st version (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Never buy 1st version (Score:2, Insightful)
Wear issue? (Score:5, Interesting)
Should that be a concern? Do these 6 month old computers already have 2-3 years of typical mileage on some of their components?
Re:Wear issue? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wear issue? (Score:3, Informative)
Lol, you're right. Think of these as "extended pre-tested" machines! Virtually guaranteed to have a lower rate of failure because they've been burnt-in already and the chances of a manufacturing defect affecting operation is lower!
Kidding aside, these machines are gone through Apple's refurbishing program. I've bought about 20 ref
Non-linear processor usage (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, I don't have anything to back that up. Occasionally Google is not so friendly.
Re:Wear issue? (Score:3, Interesting)
And what about the students? (Score:5, Interesting)
You'd have thought (as some students were hinting here at
Yet more profiteering from a supposedly educational institution.
Re:And what about the students? (Score:2)
Re:And what about the students? (Score:5, Informative)
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster... (Score:5, Funny)
Definintely charging for celebrity (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if you add the extra 512 megs of RAM from Apple's site (where prices aren't the best), these Va Tech refurbs are only $100 less than what a student would spend on the same box new. Not to mention these 2 GHz duallies are rated as "Buy only if you need it - Approaching the end of a cycle" on the Macrumors buyers' guide page [macrumors.com].
So not a deal at all if you're a student (though I have to think students at Va Tech could get the inside track on the boxes -- anyone know?) and not a great price for a refurb if you're Joe Schmoe. And not a box with great longevity, relatively speaking, either, if Macrumors has the lifecycle pegged.
Wait for a processor speed bump unless you're dying to own a little bit of celebrity.
Re:Definintely charging for celebrity (Score:2)
It's not like the machines are going to stop working or anything. It's just that the rumor mill has Apple about to roll out speed-bumped G5's.
I say this is a sweet time to pick up a dual 2 Ghz G5. Given the speed increases the rumor sites have been talking about (like 200-400 Mhz more) the new systems are not going to be that much faster than the current ones so the lower price is a win for someone lo
Re:Definintely charging for celebrity (Score:2)
Re:Definintely charging for celebrity (Score:2)
For all we know, Big Blue is probably stockpiling some 2.5GHz rated chips right now.
Radeon 9600s in the servers (Score:4, Interesting)
What would be spiffy if there was a way that they could do SOME of the math on the GPUs. I never saw a product that could do that, but it would be rather fast. No?
Re:Radeon 9600s in the servers (Score:3, Insightful)
VT didn't buy XServe's to start because there was no G5 version. Now that there is, they are, which over the long run
Re:Radeon 9600s in the servers (Score:3, Insightful)
There actually IS a way to do math on GPUs, take a look at what these people are doing [gpgpu.org]. I don't know if there is any software yet that will run on Macs and OS X, I think most of it is targeting PCs running Linux, but at least in theory you can do some some pretty high performance math on GPUs.
Of course, there are some downsides to this. First off, it only works on the latest and greatest generation of GPUs that are programable (the Radeon 9600 should qualify here). Second, GPUs only support single-prec
Cool! Macs with ECC memory for cheap! (Score:3, Funny)
They do have ECC memory, right? Having been part of a supercomputer....
look at the specs... not for servers..... (Score:4, Informative)
anyway if you look at the specs you can see all the silly stuff.... that cluster does not need 1100 Superdrives, or 1100 Radeon 9600 cards..... let alone size and whatnot... i'm sure it was done because the Xserves were just too far off and it was the only machine out there with the G5/970 chip for sale to anyone.
look at the specs:
The systems sold by MacMall are listed as 2.0GHz Power Mac G5s equipped with 1GB DDR SDRAM (2 512MB memory cards); equipped with 160GB ATA drives, a SuperDrive, ATI Radeon 9600 Pro graphics processor, Gigabit Ethernet, 3 USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 1.1 ports, 2 FireWire 400 ports and 1 FireWire 800 port, along with an AirPort Extreme card slot and no modem -- in other words, a stock Power Mac G5 Dual 2GHz system with a memory upgrade from 512MB to 1GB
it does seem the pulled the fibre cards out... they are optional in Xserves... maybe they just swapped those? i don't know if they are the same in both machines normally.
Re:look at the specs... not for servers..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if the new XServes weren't ready for another year, it's obvious that eventually these computers would be broken up and replaced. If they are full-functioning G
ohh a whole $200 off a used box... (Score:2, Funny)
(proud Mac owner already)
GJC
SOLD OUT as of 10:20AM PST (Score:5, Informative)
-Jim
Re:an extra 512 megs??? (Score:4, Insightful)
So they can make money when people forget to send the form on time, or fill it in incorrectly.
Several companies in the UK do the same for extended warranties. They say "pay lots of money and if your machine doesn't break, we'll refund it after five years". You typically get 30 days after the five years to get your money back, and most people will just forget.
Re:an extra 512 megs??? (Score:2)
Re:an extra 512 megs??? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:an extra 512 megs??? (Score:2)
Re:an extra 512 megs??? (Score:3, Informative)
$100
-$100 rebate
Re:an extra 512 megs??? (Score:5, Interesting)
so they can stick low price tags in big numbers on the shelf. That's gotten me a few times - you see, "Oh, an X for only $19.95!" so you take it up to the counter, and the cashier rings you up for $39.95 - often by then the consumer is already psychologically committed and just pays it. It's a common tactic, rebates are just one methode of exploiting consumer naivety. Bottom line is, it generates more sales.
Re:an extra 512 megs??? (Score:2)
$19.95 is a lot to pay for an X. My keyboard came with one built in...
Re:Is Slashdot selling these computers? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Then you went offtopic griping about mail in rebates
Re:Is Slashdot selling these computers? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Ironically... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it's the fastest supercomputer ever built with off-the-shelf components and the number three fastest machine on the planet -- and that's before the upgrade.
They will probably make quite a decent profit out of this, despite the $200 discount. They must have got pretty decent discount from apple for both bulk buying and promotion. And any self respecting geek will want one of these over a stock G5
As someone else pointed out, these are refurbished by Apple and then sold through MacMall. VT isn't selling them, but traded them back in to Apple for credit towards the Xserves.
Re:Ironically... (Score:2)
Why would Apple get a discount? They probably get them for cost. The question is, did VA Tech get a discount.
Re:VT must be covering their Xserve purchase (Score:2, Informative)
Re:VT must be covering their Xserve purchase (Score:4, Informative)
I believe refurb products have a 90 day warranty from Apple.
"massive wear and tear" is also known as "verified reliability"' to some people.
Re:"Big Mac" is getting bigger! I'm buying a VT no (Score:5, Funny)
And an original Lisa sold from Apple for $9,999. Hmmm. $1 profit. There's your return on investment.