College Builds the Big Mac: 1,100 G5's, Dual-Proc, 4GB Memory

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.

"Each individual G5 is a dual processor, 2GHZ machine with 4GB of memory. So it's extremely fast," said Pat Arvin, Project Coordinator at Virginia Tech.

news.bbc.co.uk...

For 5 million, that's some serious muscle..

[Edited on 12-10-2003 by kukla]

DAng!!!! I think V. Tech should charge admission for all the apple junkies whoare goin to flock there like muslims to mecca

oooOOOooo ... can you say wet dream ???

Seriously, this bring's my respect level for Apple way up there !!!

Originally posted by Quicksilver
DAng!!!! I think V. Tech should charge admission for all the apple junkies whoare goin to flock there like muslims to mecca

LOL!! that was good..

Is there some data around showing the relatives speeds between the G5 and PC?

I hear Apple trumpeting that G5's are the fasted computers out but never see any independant proof of that.

news.bbc.co.uk...
Mac fans are rushing to get their hands on what Apple calls the fastest personal computer in the world.

Here fishy, fishy....

This is kinda like when some students hooked a bunch of Playstations 2's together and made a supercomputer.

imagine all the porn you can download and how fast...

Holy $hit!!! I want I want!!

you need alot of bandwith not alot of computer power for super pr0n sucker