What to do with power?

摘要

When off-the-shelf mac G5s are assem- bled into the world's third-fastest computer, as Virginia Tech's Terascale Cluster is currently ranked, if s clear that once-exotic levels of supercomputing power are available to anyone who wants them. What's more, that so-called Big Mac 2,200-processor system, which took six months to build at a cost of only about $5 million, was ready on time and under budget. I apologize for the "only," but that cost is orders of magnitude less than the cost of other massive multiprocessor clusters, and Big Mac's performance is still improving as the system is fine-tuned. For that matter, if you're content with merely being on the list of the world's fastest 500 systems, you can spend one-tenth as much for a handful of boxes from any of several vendors: More than 40 percent are clusters, and the majority use fewer than 256 CPUs.