# The second most powerful computer on Earth is a Mac!



## hulkaros (Oct 13, 2003)

According to this here:
http://www.hardmac.com/niouzcontenu.php?date=2003-10-12#773

Here is the story, quoted:

"The  G5 cluster of the University of Virginia, in the USA, is up and running, under Mac OS X (a version of Panther° Its performances were measured for the first time under the Linpack Benchmark, and scored an amazing 17,6 TFlops !

 This result makes this supercomputer the second most powerful one, behind the famed Japanese Earth Simulator, and the most powerful of all United States. Not bad, when you know it cost a mere 5.2 millions dollars, half the estimated price from the competitors during the bid, and most of all, far less than the 100 millions that the other current supercomputers did cost 

 "Big Mac" (as nicknamed by Terascale staff) will officially join the Top5 of supercomputers during the SC2003 conference, from the 15th till the 21st November.

 P.S. : To help the comparison, Earth Simulator cost $ 350 millions, ASCI Q, the second best until now, cost 200 millions, and ASCI White (4th position) "only" $ 100 millions. So, pray tell, are macs still that expensive?
 [translation xrissley]"

WOW!


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## tsizKEIK (Oct 13, 2003)

yes they are expensive. 5 million dollars is a lot of money.. hahahahah


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## Zammy-Sam (Oct 13, 2003)

For $350 millions you can set up the "Big Mac" (lol) with 74.000 Dual G5s!  
If the scale would go linear, it should be around 1.100 TFlops! ::ha::


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## dlloyd (Oct 13, 2003)

Zammy-Sam,
either you or Hulkaros got the TFlops number wrong...


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## Zammy-Sam (Oct 13, 2003)

Well, I was calculating just quickly. But everything seems to be ok. If you spend 350 millions, you will be able to get 70 such Big Macs and if one makes 17,6 TFlops (as hulk said), it would come to more than 1.100 TFlops. I know, this won't work, but just the thought...
Or don't you agree to those 17,6 TFlops for the Virginia cluster?


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## tsizKEIK (Oct 13, 2003)

who cares bout numbers. ONE of them is enough  i hope ill get my hands on 1 soon..


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## Captain Code (Oct 13, 2003)

I think maybe he means 1100 TFlops.  English uses comma to separate "thousands" ie. 1,100 whereas French uses commas to separate decimals is 1,100=1.100 in the English way of writing it.

Now, I don't know if Germany uses decimals .  to separate thousands, or maybe it's just a typo


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## Zammy-Sam (Oct 13, 2003)

Oops! 
Ok, "." indicates thousands and "," regular comma such as 0,02 (German).
So, I meant 1100 TFlops! 

Man, this is the third time someone is complaining about my typos or grammar...
I should stop posting so frequently!


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## hulkaros (Oct 13, 2003)

I quoted the article EXACTLY as I found it... But it is 17.6 Tflops in case that are still wondering 

And here you can find the Top 5 Super Computers as of June 2003:
http://www.top500.org/lists/2003/06/top5.php

If you will read closer, you will see that the G5 based Super Computer (1100x Dual G5/2GHz) is actually 2x faster than the XEON based monster (1152x Dual XEON/2.4GHz) which at that list was 3rd out of 5...

WOW!

And then some!


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## pds (Oct 13, 2003)

But the top dog is running 500 mHz NEC processors...

so much for the megahertz myth!


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## mightyjlr (Oct 13, 2003)

If the cluster only cost 5.2 million dollars, then that should be well within the budget of say pixar, or another computer animation company... They could probably spend $10 million and have the fastest computer in the world, just to do movie renderings...


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## RacerX (Oct 13, 2003)

> _Originally posted by pds _
> *But the top dog is running 500 mHz NEC processors...
> 
> so much for the megahertz myth! *



NEC has been making great processors for a long time, both based on their own design and those of other companies. A good example would be the MIPS R3000 processors in my Silicon Graphics IRIS Indigo workstations. Sure they are an MIPS designed chip, but they were manufactured by NEC (see attached image).

Looking at both the current top 5 and the full 500 list, it is nice to see PowerPC processors very well represented. What was surprising was _which_ PowerPC processor was listed the most... the POWER3. I surely would have expected to see the POWER4 more visibly ranked then it actually is. It looks like the G5 (PPC970) is going to pass it up on this list now and is going to displace one of the two POWER3 based systems in the top 5.


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## spitty27 (Oct 14, 2003)

my hd name was "bigMac" for 3 years!!!!!!!!


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## Trip (Oct 14, 2003)

"Earth Simulator"...sounds like something out of a freaky anime movie.

And wait...havn't macs always been the most powerful computers on the earth?


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## hulkaros (Oct 15, 2003)




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## Arden (Oct 15, 2003)

Actually, it's 1100 Macs. 

The Earth Simulator does 36 teraflops, which is double that of the VT cluster.  That's just crazy.  However, the ES has over 5000 processors, whereas the VT cluster has only 2200.  I bet if they had installed 2500 dual G5's, to make 5000 processors, the VT cluster would be the #1 computer in. The. _World._

I wonder what that would do for my Quake game...


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## Randman (Oct 15, 2003)

At least they didn't name it SkyNet....


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## hulkaros (Oct 16, 2003)




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## tsizKEIK (Oct 16, 2003)

who cares bout Quake. Doom 3 is around the corner. now thats what i wanna play on a G5. and not on a cluster. a simple dual G5 will do the job  with 4 Gb of memory and ATI 9800 pro. and a 20inch cinema display. is it too much to ask ?


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## Stridder44 (Oct 16, 2003)

tsizkeik...the thing under your name (its all about house music)... SO true 

But if you had the choice, what would you (any one in general) do on the "Big Mac" cluster?


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## Zammy-Sam (Oct 16, 2003)

I would let it find my interface-residues from 8000 pdbs! 
Right now it takes almost 5 days (120 hours) on my powerbook... Would be a great thing to have it within few mins!


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## stizz (Oct 16, 2003)

This is what I would use it for.

128 tracks of digital audio at 96k 24bit, 
with multiple protools plugins running on them while at the same time running a full movie length 3-4 gig quicktime all sync'd with smpte in Digital Performer 4 with Mach 5 controlling several terabytes of sample libray, and simutaneously recording both new audio and midi sequences.

We do this now (minus the mach 5) at 48k 24bit on 32 tracks using a dual 1.25 g4 running 9. feh


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## Arden (Oct 17, 2003)

And what would you do with the other 1099 G5's? 

I'm not sure what I'd do with all those CPU cycles... Use a couple for heavy-duty rendering of various things, use several hundred for something like Folding@Home, use one for gaming... hmm.

You could record an 1100-piece orchestra with only 1 microphone per computer...


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## Zammy-Sam (Oct 17, 2003)

Hehe! And now imagine you would plug some nice speakers on each one...


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## Arden (Oct 17, 2003)

Hmm, I think the noise from the speakers sitting idle would be just about too much to bear... imagine 2200 large speakers sitting there hissing.


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## ocelot (Oct 20, 2003)

I've been following "Big Mac" since June when the first rumors of VTech building it came out - I would expect several more "large" orders of PPC970 based machines by organizations in the market for serious processing power - national weather service, various US Govt labs, and universities/governments world wide. I would also expect to see machines using AMD's new 64 bit chomper. It breaks my heart that Intel has no cheap 64 bit solution... breaks my heart... sniff sniff sniff - john.


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## macridah (Oct 22, 2003)

VT's big mac computer is unofficially 4th place ... but the big mac's numbers might improve significantly ... so it could only get better.

#1- 5120 custom processors, 35.8 trillion calculations/sec, 250 million bucks
#2 - 3072 hp processors, 13.88 trilion calculations/sec, price ?
fastest clustered computer
#  3 fastest  -  2304 Xeon processors, 7.63 trillion calculations/sec 10-15 million bucks
#4 -  2200 powerPC, 7.41  trillion calculations/sec, 5.2 millionbucks

that's for now, it might move up by november.

I'm sure there will be much more mac clusters in the very near future.


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## Arden (Oct 22, 2003)

I thought Big Mac did _17_ teraflops, not 7.


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## Captain Code (Oct 22, 2003)

17 is the theoretical performance.  Real world performance seems much less.  It is still the overall best for cost vs performance.

The huge difference has to do with low optimization.  They say(VT) will take 2 months to tune the system before using it for research to help improve the speed.

There are a lot of things that could affect the performance, such as bad network design, poor programming and poor disk access.

read more


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## tsizKEIK (Oct 30, 2003)

http://www.mediaworkers.de/text-align/index.html

the BIG mac is at third place right now.. 9.5 trflops but will certainly gow up...


[/QUOTE]"Ironically, they lost the gigahertz game," he said of Intel. "(The G5) is extremely faster than the Itanium II,





> he he he..


The cluster was assembled in less than a month by hundreds of student volunteers who were paid only in soda and pizza for their labor. They ate between 600 and 700 pizzas, Varadarajan estimated. 





> its funny how simple macs can be some time..
> cummon... a supercomputer assembled by students who are rewarded with pizza...
> 
> its amazin how cheap this supercomputer was (bare in mind there was no special deal... the G5s were bought of the apple store for the same price), and the time it took to built this thing is also amazing. read the article . its good


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## bookem (Oct 31, 2003)

I wonder how quick it runs SETI@Home?


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## hulkaros (Oct 31, 2003)

tsizKEIK said:
			
		

> http://www.mediaworkers.de/text-align/index.html


"Ironically, they lost the gigahertz game," he said of Intel. "(The G5) is extremely faster than the Itanium II,The cluster was assembled in less than a month by hundreds of student volunteers who were paid only in soda and pizza for their labor. They ate between 600 and 700 pizzas, Varadarajan estimated. 





> its funny how simple macs can be some time..
> cummon... a supercomputer assembled by students who are rewarded with pizza...
> 
> its amazin how cheap this supercomputer was (bare in mind there was no special deal... the G5s were bought of the apple store for the same price), and the time it took to built this thing is also amazing. read the article . its good



For THAT many pizzas I would assemble alone for them 2200 Dual G5s!!!


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## Arden (Oct 31, 2003)

Bookem: Quite well, I'm sure. 

Tsiz:  Actually, they got quite a discount on the systems.  The retail cost of each G5, with 4 GB of RAM, is $5350... 1100 of those would be almost $5.9 million, and that doesn't count the cost of the infrastructure, which you can bet added significantly to the cost.  And yet they got it for only $5.2 million.  I'd say they got quite a good educational discount on the G5's.


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## RacerX (Nov 3, 2003)

So assuming that the current results are going to stand (the Big Mac has a ways to go to displace the system in second place), this is how the top 25 (plus 1) looks:

 1.  5,120  NEC processors @ 500 MHz
 2.  8,192  EV-68 processors @ 1.25 GHz
 3.  2,200  PowerPC 970 processors @ 2.0 GHz	(IBM/Apple)
 4.  2,304  Xeon processors @ 2.4 GHz			(Intel)
 5.  8,192  POWER3 processors @ 375 MHz		(IBM)
 6.  6,656  POWER3 processors @ 375 MHz		(IBM)
 7.  1,920  Xeon processors @ 2.4 GHz			(Intel)
 8.  2,304  HPC2500 processors @ 1.3 GHz
 9.  1,540  Itanium 2 processors @ 1.0 GHz		(Intel)
10. 3,016  ES-45 processors @ 1.0 GHz
11. 2,560  ES-45 processors @ 1.0 GHz
12. 1,536  Xeon processors @ 2.2 GHZ			(Intel)
13. 1,280  POWER4 processors @ 1.3 GHz		(IBM)
14. 1,216  POWER4 processors @ 1.3 GHz		(IBM)
15. 1,184  POWER4 processors @ 1.3 GHz		(IBM)
16.    960  POWER4 processors @ 1.3 GHz		(IBM)
17.    960  POWER4 processors @ 1.3 GHz		(IBM)
18.  9,632  Intel processors @ ? MHz			(Intel)
19.    864  POWER4 processors @ 1.3 GHz		(IBM)
20.  1,024  P4 Xeon processors @ 1.8 GHz		(Intel)
21. 1,392  ES-45 processors @ 1.0 GHz
22. 5,808  PowerPC 604e processors @ 375 MHz	(IBM)
23.    800  POWER4 processors @ 1.3 GHz		(IBM)
24.  1,920  POWER3 processors @ 375 MHz		(IBM)
25.    768  POWER4 processors @ 1.3 GHz		(IBM)
26.    600  P4 Xeon processors @ 1.8 GHz		(Intel/Dell)
Some interesting things about this list: 13 of the top 25 use PowerPC based processors while only 5 use x86 based processors from Intel (and only one uses Intel's Itanium 2 processors). Also the addition of an Apple-based system knocked a Dell based system out of the top 25. 

Plus it is cool that one of the PowerPC based systems on that list is using the 604e. Sort of makes those older pre-G3 Power Macs look a little better.


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## fryke (Nov 3, 2003)

We'll see in mid-November.  c't newsticker - http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/boi-03.11.03-002/ - today released a newsbit about this as well. BigMac has reached 10.28 TFlops according to them. Still ways to go number 2, but number 3 seems to be a safe bet right now.
And yes: The most important number about BigMac is, of course, the price. I hope Apple will tout this as soon as the numbers are out.


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## tsizKEIK (Nov 3, 2003)

the Big Mac is made from power macs...
so.. wouldnt a G5 based Xserve supercomputer (eventually) do better ? or not ? would it be too expensive


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## bookem (Nov 3, 2003)

I wonder how 8192 G5's would rate?  Should only cost $20,000,000 or so!


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## fryke (Nov 3, 2003)

Xserves would of course make it easier to stack them into racks. Less space used, too, I guess... But I'm wondering, too, if this will lead to big people thinking differently about supercomputing. Will this lead to less Power4/Power5 sales...? And what will IBM do, then?


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## tsizKEIK (Nov 3, 2003)

what are u implyin fryke. that apple should have gone amd64??/ (j/k) he he he...


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## RacerX (Nov 3, 2003)

I'm still wondering what software they use to turn a bunch of Macs into a SuperComputer...

 hummm.... 

What if it was....


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## Arden (Nov 4, 2003)

LOL, I don't think that's it.

They use Deja Vu, which was developed by, Srinidhi Varadarajan, the project leader, to distribute the required tasks among all the computers.  You can read about it on the web site... http://computing.vt.edu/research_computing/terascale/


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## RacerX (Nov 4, 2003)

arden said:
			
		

> They use Deja Vu,



Yeah, but does it have all the real cool widgets? What's the point without the pretty interface? Is Deja Vu done in brush or aqua?



I guess Varadarajan just doesn't get what the Mac is all about.


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## Cat (Nov 4, 2003)

Check out project AppleSeed (Apple page)
and this small cluster and this very cute mini cluster. LOL! 

Try this at home!

EDIT: There's also this small XServe cluster at NASA, running OS X. Others above are all OS 9 AFAICT.


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## Arden (Nov 4, 2003)

RacerX said:
			
		

> Yeah, but does it have all the real cool widgets? What's the point without the pretty interface? Is Deja Vu done in brush or aqua?
> 
> 
> 
> I guess Varadarajan just doesn't get what the Mac is all about.


 

Uh huh...


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