----- Original Message ----- From: "William T Goodall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003 9:10 AM Subject: New Supercomputer
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3180872.stm > > " Everyone would love a supercomputer but with a price tag of around > $100m each they are not easy to come by. > > But in the United States staff and students at Virginia Tech have built > one of the world's most powerful supercomputers for just $5m by > plugging together hundreds of the latest computers from Apple. > > The project involved placing 1,100 brand new Apple G5 towers side by > side, making it the world's most powerful "homebuilt" system. > > It is capable of 17.6 trillion floating point operations per second, > with a combined storage capacity of 176 terabytes. " OK, I'm a bit confused here. I double checked on Apple's website, and see that each tower has two 2 Ghz processors. As a result, we see that we have, roughly 4.4 THz of processing. I know about array processing, but this machine's specs do not seem to include that. They claim to be about 1.8 x a single processor P4. Putting that together, and I cannot see how there would be 4 floating point operations per clock cycle. This must be a case of multiplying instead of dividing by 4, which is more typical: 4 clock cycles per CPU per operation. Dan M. > -- > William T Goodall > Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk > Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/ > > "Aerospace is plumbing with the volume turned up." - John Carmack > > _______________________________________________ > http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l > _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
