On Nov 29, 2005, at 5:29 AM, Rob Studdert wrote:
... Our nearby university, and my alma mater, Virginia Tech just
recently
built a supercomputer by interconnecting some humongous number of
high-end desktop machines. They used Macs for this project in spite
of the higher costs, primarily because of much greater reliability in
their experience. It works great and some other universities are
following their lead.
Again interesting, I hadn't heard of Mac farms usually they tend to
use PC
servers running some form of UNIX, maybe they are now harnessing
the UNIX side
of the Macs now that the OS has grown up?
Do a search on "virginia tech supercomputer". Their teraserver, in
2003, was the third-fastest supercomputer in the world, comprised of
1100 Power Macintosh G5 2Ghz DP boxes coupled together with some
extreme high-speed communications equipment. It runs Mac OS X.
Modifications to Mac OS X were extremely small to achieve this: they
dropped in a revised memory allocator (standard one is optimized for
balanced performance on a client system, a distributed supercomputer
requires a different optimization strategy to maintain maximum
throughput). Total change was 800 lines of source code (I was on the
team that assisted in this project). Later versions are even faster
since they moved to the Xserve box instead of the desktop system.
Many other universities and labs have built distributed
supercomputers based on this effort's success.
BTW: Discussions that resolve to more inane "mac vs pc vs linux vs
who-knows-what" babble are really not worth the time to read.
Godfrey
