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XServe cluster ranks 14 among top supercomputers

updated 06:15 pm EDT, Wed June 22, 2005

XServe cluster


Virginia Tech's "System X" Apple XServe supercomputer now ranks . The XServe cluster has 2200 processors in total, and was created in 2004. It ranks 9th overall in the United States. Nine of the thirteen supercomputers that rank above Virginia Tech's were created in 2005. The top ranked supercomputer is the BlueGene/L eServer Blue Gene Solution from IBM. It has around ten times the computing power of the Virginia Tech cluster. It includes 65,536 processors. Japan's famous Earth-Simulator supercomputer, which features 5120 processors, now ranks fourth overall. Three other Apple supercomputers made the top 500 list. Clusters at the University of Illinois, UCLA Plasma Physics Group, and Bowie State University tanked 66th, 162nd, and 166th, respectively.


by MacNN Staff

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  1. drdocument

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Jul 2001

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    06/22, 07:06pm | report spam | Reply |

    Apple most powerful?

    Just for fun I calculated the per-processor power of some of these servers by dividing the R-max (Maximal LINPACK performance achieved) by the number of processors. The Virginia Tech System X took first place with a "score" of 5.56818182. Next highest was the SGI system at NASA-Ames Research center with a score of 5.10531496. The number one system, the IBM at LLNL scored only 2.08740234, the Cray system at Sandia 3.05, and the HP system at Los Alamos 1.69433594.

  1. macamac

    Baninated

    Joined: Jun 2005

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    06/22, 08:40pm | report spam | Reply |

    Format

    Very enterprising of you to compile those numbers, but it was a little difficult to follow so I just changed the format of your post to show them with a little more impact. Not much mind you but...

    Just for fun I calculated the per-processor power of some of these servers by dividing the R-max (Maximal LINPACK performance achieved) by the number of processors.

    The Virginia Tech System X took first place with a "score" of

    5.56818182

    Next highest was the SGI system at NASA-Ames Research center with a score of

    5.10531496

    The number one system, the IBM at LLNL scored only

    2.08740234

    the Cray system at Sandia 3.05, and the HP system at Los Alamos

    1.69433594

  1. drdocument

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Jul 2001

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    06/22, 09:16pm | report spam | Reply |

    Format

    Thanks for the reformat.

    And I know that there are other variables which might affect functioning computing "power" measurements of any particular system.

    I chose only one system of each processor type from the first 14 systems on the list.

    From a lay perspective, does this mean that on a per-processor basis the Apple system at Va Tech is 2.5 times as fast as the IBM system at LLNL? Or, stated another way, 250 percent faster?

  1. trevc

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    Joined: Mar 2000

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    06/23, 01:33am | report spam | Reply |

    So....

    ... is it the OS, or the PowerPC processor (or both) that makes them contend as a super computer.

    What's it mean if an Intel is inside?? (No really, I don't know!)

  1. budster101

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    Joined: Dec 2004

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    06/23, 02:17am | report spam | Reply |

    I think it's

    How they work together, so when Apple goes to the Intel Inside Chip, it will be custom configured to work with the OS, as well as the rest of the hardware. I'm no expert here, but it makes sense that the hardware plays a role as well as the OS AND the Processor. I think that the OS takes every advantage over the processor.

    How else can such a thing happen? It's so much less expensive than the top 100 listed. How'd they do that?

    Very cool. I'm surprised more institutions aren't jumping on the X-server platform. That is my question.

    I'm looking forward to the move to Intel, and see what they come up with. Should be cool.

  1. dru

    Senior User

    Joined: Apr 2002

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    06/23, 02:51am | report spam | Reply |

    Intel spells Doom

    Apple will fade into obscurity with this move.

  1. apple4ever

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    Joined: Jan 2001

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    06/23, 05:39pm | report spam | Reply |

    PowerPC

    No, its the PowerPC processor which is better. Apple moving to Intel will drop them off this list fast. (Especially since the reason for many of the clusters is AltiVec, which is vastly superior to SSE. SSE is half as fast than AltiVec, when SSE is on a processor with twice the Hz than the AltiVec processor). OSX is great, don't get me wrong, but OSX+PPC is better than OSX+x86.

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