From this Slashdot article.
Finally Varadarajan has put some hard facts on the speed of the VT ‘Big Mac’ G5 cluster. Undoubtedly after some weeks of tuning and optimization, the home-brewn supercluster is happily rolling around at 9.555 TFlops in LINPACK. The revelations were made by the parallel computing vodoo master himself at the O’Reilly MacOSX conference. It seems they are expecting and additional 10% speed boost after some more tweaking. Srinidhi received standing ovations from the audience. Wired news is also running a cool news piece on it. Lots of juicy technical and cost details not revealed before. Myth dispelling redux: yes, VT paid full price, yes, it’s running MacOSX Jaguar ( soon Panther), yes, errors in RAM are accounted for, Varadarajan was not an Apple fanboy in the least…”
What’s so important about this you ask? Well besides being super cool, this represents the first supercomputer/cluster that is available to the average consumer. Sure Beowulf and Mosix style clustering has been available for Linux for some time now, but those solutions required some serious geek gumbo to get going. Additionally in order to get the kinds of peak performance necessary to rank in the Top 10 of the Top 500 supercomputers you would still need some special hardware running on high end Unix servers. This Mac G5 cluster uses systems that anyone could buy at an Apple store, that is quite a feat.
During the question-and-answer period at the end, an audience member from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory introduced himself as coming from the institution that had the Supercomputer that the Virginia Tech cluster had just passed. He asked whether the details of the Supercomputer would be published. The reply was that in addition to documentation and papers, the plans are to return the changes to MVAPICH to the open source project so that it would be freely available. There are also plans to open source the caching code and Varadarajan expects that Mellanox’s code will be available.
I can see the conversation now. “Honey, I need some Mac servers. Why do you need them? Because I do okay.