Apple to Award Workgroup Clusters to Scientists 199
Graff writes "Apple is giving away five Apple Workgroup Clusters for Bioinformatics (each worth approximately $40,000) to four higher
education researchers and one non-education researcher. A panel of independent scientists and Apple will choose the lucky researchers."
Nifty (Score:5, Funny)
computing power is unfairly distributed (Score:5, Interesting)
If your definition of "mad scientist" is "person working on weapons of mass destruction", ie, nuclear weapons, most of them already have the world's largest clusters. Pretty sad that we still consider it important to build better nuclear weapons even though we've got thousands of them, and not a single legitimate target for them(the whole deterrence thing is ridiculous- if it's just about deterrence, we only need a dozen or so).
It'd be nice to see some computing horsepower, if only a small piece, go to those trying to do something other than make better nuclear bombs or look for little green men...ie something (gasp) productive.
Re:computing power is unfairly distributed (Score:3, Offtopic)
Re:computing power is unfairly distributed (Score:4, Funny)
oh (Score:5, Funny)
Apple and bioinformatics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Apple and bioinformatics (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a bit broad. K-12 education, sure, but at the bioinformatics lab I worked with, we worked exclusively with IBM. The attractiveness of using consumer-level Macs in a grade school setting most certainly doesn't translate to a high-performance computing environment. That might change as Apple moves into this space, however...we'll see.
Re:Apple and bioinformatics (Score:5, Informative)
When I worked at the University of Washington doing life sciences research, my personal observation saw it to be about 50/50 pc vs mac. (And the UW is a giant in life sciences) When I left in 1999, linux was slowly creeping in but most of the unix based stuff was run by the computer center. The 50/50 number is certainly different than the 95/5 or whatever the worldwide average is/was. And my observations were only in the life-sciences. I have no idea what the ratios were in say, physics or chemistry.
Re:Apple and bioinformatics (Score:2)
Re:Apple and bioinformatics (Score:5, Informative)
However, more and more astrophysicists are using Macs these days. Apple laptops are very popular, and people are also starting to use Macs as workstations and servers. It's hard to guess at numbers, so I'll note anecdotally that my (small) lab is in the process of replacing our 4 aging Suns with G5 towers. We're also considering an XServe cluster to run some moderately substantial simulations. I don't think we're unusual in those regards.
Re:Apple and bioinformatics (Score:5, Funny)
Somehow, this doesn't seem surprising...
Astrophysics and Macs (Score:2)
With 64bit macs, I'm guessing they're going to get an even stronger foothold, especially as we look at the G5 XServe [which if procurement ever gets right, might actually come in sometime this year].
Re:Apple and bioinformatics (Score:3, Informative)
As far as clustering though, MS and Apple are insignificant. Though at least now there are Apple clusters. (The majority of Windows clusters I've seen are donated) And as far as desktops, UNIX and Apple are in the same league. Though the trend in grad students is an increasing numb
Re:Apple and bioinformatics (Score:3, Interesting)
It depends on the branch of life sciences, and more importantly, the biases of the individual professor.
In most computational labs, ALL of the computing is done on Unix, which nowadays means mostly Linux. In crystallography, people still hang on to SGIs but there's a lot of migration towards both Linux and Mac. In fact, my impression is that Apple may be making real pro
Re:Apple and bioinformatics (Score:2, Interesting)
Three years ago, I saw NO mac laptops in the audience. 300 people, all mathematicians,computer scientists and electrical engineers, half of them with a laptop, no mac.
Two years ago, some appeared.
Last years, one in twenty had a mac laptop.
This year, one in ten. It's amazing how people are "discovering" powerbooks and ibooks.
And you can tell the owner from the machine!
Firm execs or young academicians backed by
Re:Apple and bioinformatics (Score:4, Informative)
297 Total Unique MACs
105 Apple
58 3Com
20 HP
17 Intel
12 Sun
10 CompalElec
8 Dell
5 Sony
4 Toshiba
Dumped my database of all mac addresses into a text file, then:
The actual prize (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The actual prize (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The actual prize (Score:2)
Re:The actual prize (Score:2)
I ordered the day the damned machine was launched, and I'm still waiting.
If these are awarded and -SHIPPED- before we get ours, I will very likely be speaking to our legal department.
I need the machine, and I needed it two months ago.
-
J.
Re:The actual prize (Score:2)
Vijay, are you going to apply?
Re:The actual prize (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The actual prize (Score:2)
Also, the Xserve G5's have the same adaptive fanspeeds as the desktop Powermac G5's, so if they aren't working hard they are extremely quiet.
Re:The actual prize (Score:2)
Re:The actual prize (Score:2)
That was a general point on the noise, not a specific point on the cluster, Mr. Literal.
Re:What, no iPod? (Score:2)
For the love of god... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:For the love of god... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:For the love of god... (Score:2)
Re:For the love of god... (Score:2)
United Devices (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:United Devices (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps a give away to Folding@Home [stanford.edu] wouldn't be so bad.
Re:United Devices (Score:4, Informative)
BFD (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:BFD (Score:2)
Of course! When Apple does somthing thats been done before its because they're inovative.
Re:BFD (Score:2)
Re:BFD (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:BFD (Score:2)
2001 A Space Odyssey (Score:3, Funny)
My Proposal (Score:3, Funny)
I would like to formally propose an educational study in which the effect that faster Photoshop and Quark X-Press productivity would have on my pocket book would be studied. I'd also like to crunch some numbers on the effect of staggering frame rates in UT2K4 would have on my on-line gaming experience, as I currently suck. My studio would be the happy receipient of one of your donor G5 machines. Thank you for your time.
Re:My Proposal (Score:2)
I love Apple but their commercials suck. There's no meat to them.
Calculating the payoff (Score:4, Insightful)
5 $40,000 (retail) prizes = $200,000 retail
only 4 ($160,000) are educational and after looking at the awards, there is no stipulation the 1 non-educational award must go to a non-profit so there is only the $160,000 tax right off guaranteed.
Now if you are a reseller, I don't know if you can right off the retail value of the goods & services donation or not, so that would make the value even lower.
Now the return on the investment:
Well you get smart people in research institutions all over the country dreaming up ways to use 5 Xserves and the 10 way G5 64=bit computing power they bring. So even if they don't win, somebody may get some dollars budgeted to actually buy this type of system outright. Or perhaps they win a different grant and use those moneys to fund it.
Then you have publicity. At least a few hundred
So what's left
So after Apple ponies up $200,000 in hardware and software, less their margins and tax deductions, they still spent six figures on a marketing stunt and some good Karma. Will it pay for itself? Well if only ONE of these institutions who wins a cluster actually adds on to it within an order of magnitude of V-tech, I would say 'yeah' it will pay for itself.
Have other companies (Big Blue, Hp, etc) had success with similar programs?
Ordinary scientists (Score:2)
...if they have $40k (or are awarded the grant).
How many "ordinary scientists" have $40k burning a hole in their pocket?
And who would admit to being an ordinary scientist anyway!?
Re:Ordinary scientists (Score:3, Offtopic)
Re:Ordinary scientists (Score:5, Informative)
At a decent research university, probably most of them. If they're comp bio, they probably have even more money than that. In bioinformatics, you don't need to spend $250 on a milliliter of antibodies or thousands of dollars on primers - the overhead for keeping a lab running is much lower. And experimentalists regularly have to spend considerably more than $40k on their equipment - as the other poster pointed out, microscopes are an excellent example. (EM systems are even worse - these are usually at least $300k.) Therefore, grant money stretches a long way.
It's a sales ploy... (Score:2, Flamebait)
I decline! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I decline! (Score:2)
If that fails, the XServe doubles as a handy bludgeon--feel free to beat the Win-Magnans all the way back to their cave.
Re:I decline! (Score:2)
(This was no joke! They really won't support anything other than Windows XP for desktops or FreeBSD (and 2003 Server) for servers.)
Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apple (Score:3, Informative)
I think people are confusing commercial and non-commercial apps. The commercial programs are either targeted towards industry/pharma, or are part of some other proprietary system - for example, controlling a purification or mass spec system. These are usually W
Re:Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
My cousin does cancer research at Harvard, and I design/write software for a living. He found that there was a huge empty space for software that would help him do his job (cancer research), so 2 years ago we started a software company that specializes in reagent management (cryogenic storage, dna plasmids, oligos, antibodies, protocols, animal experiments, etc., all cross-referenced), and made sure that it was 100% Java and cross-platform.
While we really have no direct competition (yet), it is very interesting to see the platform requirement limitations (mostly DOS/Windows) that a lot of the other software companies have. There really is a huge shortage of cross-platform software.
Our experience has shown that most commercial labs tend to be Windows based, while most academic labs are Mac based. It is also not uncommon to have the Academic labs have 1 or 2 Win32 boxes that are there just to run a particular program they're using. It also appears that the IT departments in academia tend to use Linux back-end servers, with an interestingly high occurance of Yellow Dog. (That's Linux on PPC, for those of you unfamiliar with YD). Usually, we've found that the YD servers are older G3 and G4 towers that have been repurposed.
Now, these are the environments that we've been exposed to, and may not accurately represent the group as a whole, but regardless, it's been an interesting and enlightening experience seeing what/how different labs are currently (and used to) using by way of software.
Dear Apple (Score:5, Funny)
PC vs. Mac bickering. (Score:3, Insightful)
Good to see It just works computing in the Lab (Score:3, Interesting)
Roll on clustered Shake and FCP renndering though.
You're an idiot. (Score:4, Troll)
So writing puff pieces about your great accomplishment means they own it? Bull.
Re:You're an idiot. (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly what are you suggesting? (Score:4, Funny)
Are you suggesting that for some reason Giant Pandas are not worthy of this prize?
Re:The award should be for PCs (Score:4, Insightful)
For gui-based stuff, that might be true. But a very big percentage of bioinformatics is done on the command line. And there is a wealth of free unix based bioinformatics software out there.
Re:The award should be for PCs (Score:2)
I'm not sure what kind of science you're talking about, but Macs are extremely popular in the life sciences, and many of the apps my lab uses--Vector NTI, Sequencer, etc.--most certainly do run on Macs. At my university, both the neurobiology and the biochemistry departments use macs, and in the labs, PCs tend to be in the minority. Our bioinformatics group is split about 50:50, but the head of the group has fallen in love with his new TiBook and is trying to switch everyone over. So if you're right th
Re:The award should be for PCs (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The award should be for PCs (Score:5, Informative)
The award should be for PCs.
Apple should give away competitors' hardware? To what end?
Only a tiny fraction of the science-related software out there runs on Macintosh.
Hmm. Interesting, broad comment with no support. In the Life Sciences, my experience is that about half of us use Mac OS X. Not a bad cut of the market. If only a "tiny fraction" of the applications used are available, why do so many people use it over Linux, Windows and other platforms?
Word to the wise: think before you make senseless observations.
Re:The award should be for PCs (Score:2)
Mac OS X for UNIX Users [apple.com] (~500KB PDF)
Science and Macs (Score:3, Informative)
That said, I wonder what I might do to encourage developers to write more science-related software that will run on Macintosh computers? This would appear to be a step toward that goal.
Re:The award should be for PCs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:4, Interesting)
Market share and install base are definitely linked. If Apple's only selling 3% of computers, their install base is going to trend to 3% over time, holding all other things equal.
Mathematical example: total market is 100 computers, Apple has 3% market share)
Year 0: 6 Macs, 150 PCs (so Apple has about 3.8% of the install base when we start)
Year 1: 9 Macs, 247 PCs (install base is 3.5%)
Year 2: 12 Macs, 344 PCs (install base is 3.3%)
Year 3: 15 Macs, 441 PCs (install base is 3.2%)
I think you get the picture. Market share is not representative of total install base RIGHT NOW, but is certainly a good indicator of what's going to happen in the future. If you disagree, that's too bad, because I've just mathematically shown that you're wrong. Market share and install base are definitely linked.[1]
Apple's profitability really has nothing to do with their install base so much as their margins. If I'm selling stuff with a huge mark-up on actual costs, I could sell 30 pieces of it and still make money, even if the total market is 3 billion pieces.
-Erwos
[1] As for your "PCs don't last as long as Macs": prove it. I've used Macs for years, and Apple's build quality is not as good as people make it out to be. I'm not going to factor in differing "computer decays" without any kind of proof for them.
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:5, Insightful)
year 1: 0 new Macs, 10 PCs replaced
year 2: 0 new Macs, 10 PCs replaced
year 3: 10 Macs replaced, 10 PCs replaced
year 4: 0 new Macs, 10 PCs replaced
year 5: 0 new Macs, 10 PCs replaced
total sold: 20 Macs, 60 PCs
install base: 10 Macs, 10 PCs
I have seen research that shows Macs have something like twice the life of a PC.
I've owned both Macs and PCs for years, and my Macs are capable of running more new software then the PCs.
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:2, Informative)
As crazy as it appears, this pretty much echos what I see at the clients I've supported - especially in the laptop arena.
At least in the graphic arts and video sector, anyone who thinks that PCs offer better TCO is oblivious to reality and/or a zealot.
Ah Yup... (Score:3, Interesting)
And no. I'm not some mindless Mac drone. I've been using and admining x86 and SPARC boxes since forever.
I use Solaris, Linux, OS X and Windows on a daily basis, and I'm totally blown away with the stability of OS X and how we
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:2)
-Erwos
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not really. Just that Mac advocates typically engage in the intellectual dishonesty of comparing $3000 Macs with $1000 PCs.
Furthermore, it's pretty clear that G4 have had a pretty long lifespan because PowerPC development was so retarded. Until the G5s came out there really wasn't a compelling upgrade for PMac G4 users.
I'm not sure if the long shelf-life of Macs really help anyone. Mac users have to wait until they've saved up another $2000+ to upgrade, and in the meanwhile they're stuck wtih old machines, and Apple is getting no revenue. A PC user might pay less to replace a cheap machine every year and always have top-end kit.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:2)
If you can do your job on a X year old $Y Mac, you can do it on a X year old $Y PC. Period.
However, you can replace the PC for cheaper and get a hugely faster machine, which still isn't true for Macs, except at the top end. I'd buy a new Mac, but the low-end of their lapt
Re: (Score:2)
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:3, Insightful)
You can sell one for more money than the other on eBay. Four such Macs are currently getting $625, $550, $465, and $51.50. 500 MHz Pentium III computers are getting between $89.95 and $9.99. It's not particularly easy to search for a dual PIII (any ever made?), but that should give you the picture.
A PC user might pay less to replace a cheap machine every year and always have top-end kit.
If you need or
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:2)
Also, Mac buyers on ebay are completely insane -- a CDRW drive for my 6 year old powerbook goes for like $400. You could buy a whole fuckin PC to burn CDs for that.
> If you need or want to stay in the "top end", then you cannot be buying "cheap machines" every year.
Well, in the P
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:2)
Somebody just paid, if memory serves, $104M for a painting. Markets don't have to make sense. The money you get from selling your old Mac is still real. You are exhibiting what some critics of the iPod often fail to understand: the iPod is not "overpriced", because people are buying it. The price is whatever the market will bear.
If Apple introduces a 2Ghz "G5 Mini" for $1000, as discussed on the rumor sites, those old PMacs wo
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:2)
You are not counting the rate at which the computers are removed from the market. This is anecdotal evidence but I find that Macintosh computers tend to be removed from the market at a rate 1/2 that as Windows computers. I have seen studies in the past that bear this out but I can't seem to locate one on the internet right no
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:2)
And face it, the longer those people sit on their ancient Macs, the more likely it is that they will be assimilated into the PeeCee ecosystem -- I've seen happen to a few friends of mine.
The cool thing about the original iMac was that it got all those old ass Mac users into the store to buy a new Mac. And that drove software and perpheri
Perpetual Marketshare? (Score:5, Funny)
This leads to the conclusion that Apple must have invented purpetual self sustaining marketshare, a graph of which could make MC Escher proud, and that they must patent this immediately so that they can increase their marketshare to -pi
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Perpetual Marketshare? (Score:2)
I'll bite. The PC users that need to buy computers every 2 years are the bleeding edge gamers that need to play the most recent games with everything turned on and with 60 fps. You don't see that with the apple crowd because the vast majority of the cutting edge "buy a new video card" games do not come out for Mac (this is not flamebait, this is the cold hard truth).
The two closes friends that are *no
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Perpetual Marketshare? (Score:2)
Six years ago, neither of my kids had computers. Now they both have Macs. Multiply that out!
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:2)
Re:/. double standards? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is that so fucking hard to understand?
Re:/. double standards? (Score:2)
So Gates isn't allowed to donate to 3rd world countries because two of his products is a de-facto monopoly that the market decided it likes?
Re:/. double standards? (Score:3, Insightful)
When Gates donates large numbers of Windows machines to e.g. school districts which have traditionally be Mac-based, that's quite a different story. It's very obvious that such actions are more of an investment than a real donation -- and they may actually constitute ille
Re:/. double standards? (Score:5, Insightful)
See, e. g., this [slashdot.org] and this [slashdot.org].
Re:/. double standards? (Score:2)
Is that so fucking hard to understand?
Aparently so, since MS isn't a monopoly. They *have* a monopoly.. in consumer level commercial OSes.
Apple has a monopoly too.. in online music distribution.
Re:/. double standards? (Score:5, Informative)
because they control the vast amount of the computing market. you don't have to own all 100% of it just to be declared a monopoly. perhaps you should also keep [cnn.com] up [pcworld.com] with the news. the US and the EU have declared microsoft a monopoly.
If that makes Microsoft a monopoly doesn't that make Apple an even worse monopoly (they control the hardware AND the software)?
sigh. i sometimes wonder if people will ever understand the truth about apple. apple makes the case, the motherboard, the power supply, and the operating system. that's IT. every other component of a mac (including the cpu, video card, hard disk, ram, cdrom, lcds, crts, etc, etc) is standard. if some other company came along and implemented a ppc chip that implemented the same instruction set as the g3-g5 chips and used hardware components (ethernet, video, sound) that are compatible with os x's drivers and implement the openfirmware STANDARD then it will run os x. now that may not be legal according to the EULA but you can do it. worst case you can run linux on your machine, or freebsd, or the various other free *nix operating systems that run just FINE on ppc hardware. heck even windows nt 4 ran on mac hardware (albeit a long time ago, not anymore). if you want more ppc hardware, send a nice letter to amd and intel to implement more ppc compatible chips. send a letter to the various mobo manufacterers to implement more motherboards that agree to said specs. its no different than companies implementing intel's x86 specs. stop spreading FUD
Re:/. double standards? (Score:2)
That's not actually true. It won't run OS X unless the board has the proper Mac ROM that can only be had from Apple that allows MacOS to run on a particular machine. OS X will not run without this ROM chip.
Re:/. double standards? (Score:2)
Two words: gift culture.
Re:Bioinformatics eh? (Score:2)
Now go away.
Re:Bioinformatics eh? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Bioinformatics eh? (Score:2)
Re:Apple clusters? (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't seen anything recently, but at one time BLAST ran up to 16x faster on a G4 than a P4.
Re:Thanks a lot (Score:2)
Admittedly, the update probably didn't need reboots, but it doesn't really give you a choice. My reviewlet is: "Nice UI, a bit opaque". I'm not planning on replacing it, as was my original kneejerk reaction.