Dell cluster vs. Apple cluster; redux
updated 12:05 am EDT, Tue October 14, 2003
MacNN reader Dave Shroeder writes: "The University of Texas just rolled out a that achieves 17.6 Tflops, constructed in 3 months." Several readers followed up on the pricing and cost issues involved: [updated]
"The $38M total was NOT for a single supercomputer. Please correct this information immediately. It was announced inFebruary for a total package that included:
The establishment of the new Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences (ICES) at UT, including:
- four new endowed faculty chairs in ICES at UT
- additional funding for the research endowment and the visiting scholars endowment in ICES
- the completion of construction of the ACES building (the 4th floor) for use by ICES and TACC
and the establishment of a terascale distributed computing infrastructure at UT, hosted by TACC, including:
- two supercomputers at TACC (the cluster you refer to, and the other IBM system)
- two massive storage systems at TACC
- three leading-edge components to increase UT's networking infrastructure
- increases in operations funding over five years for ICES and TACC
The original author also followed-up on the his note:
"The 17.6 Tflops figure is Rpeak (theoretical max performance). LINPACK Rmax (maximum achieved performance), the measured benchmark by which rankings are judged, will be announced at a session on November 18 at Supercomputing 2003.
"It may also be worth pointing out that the $38M figure is for the 5-year life of the project at UT, while the $5.2M figure is the initial cost of the asset itself at VT, and does not include operational money. The dollar amounts aren't directly comparable.
"In fact, based on all the responses I've gotten, this story, as posted, probably isn't very accurate. It might be better to link to both of the articles, mention that the numbers are just theoretical max performance and that "real world" numbers will follow. One could imagine that Apple is bound to make a good showing in price/performance, but the price/Tflop figures are not accurate because the prices include different things."
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Joined: Jul 2001
Errrr...
I think you're jumping to conclusions a bit when it comes to figures: the Dell systems number 300 - the VT cluster is 1100 G5s - hardly fair as far as Tflops comparisons.
I'd like to see an itemized comparison: just because they say the 38M is for the 'cluster' I doubt all of that was spent on hardware. (just as if VT had counted all of the support items of their cluster: construction, racks, etc)
In other words, unless you know where every million went, stop making an a** of Mac users by ignoring 'those extra details'