The Virginia Tech Supercomputer was finally announced as the world's 3rd fastest on the Top 500 List.

Besides some fancy cisco equipment, this supercomputer is just a cluster of 1100 Powermac G5's. Amazingly enough, they're running OSX on the mnachines, too! They said they were going to upgrade to Panther, but I'm not sure if they were able to do so yet -- pretty amazing stuff.

- trs

*Grammar Police Statement* - Sorry for the elision in the title, now that I know what an elision is thanks to William Sapphire.

how do you upgrade 1100 macs i take it it is one poor bloke with a disc and a pair of step ladders

okay how does this work

Does on computer get all the programs dropped onto it and it then fires out data to the rest of the computers and then they process it and then shove it back at the orginal computer Somthing like seti but a bit more hi tech

Hopefully they've got some sort of remote upgrade capability. If not then I'd hope they've got more than a single disc

That's exactly the situation I imagined. But hopefully, they have some machines with OS X Server installed so they could use network install. Otherwise, I'd hate to be that bloke!

- trs

Nerds!!!!

Hooray for my alma matter!


Go Hokies!

Does on computer get all the programs dropped onto it and it then fires out data to the rest of the computers and then they process it and then shove it back at the orginal computer

I think so, aren't they usually a process that requires several iterations. So each one is handled by a separate machine. We had a 30 machine render farm at uni. Each machine handled a frame each. So the whole scene would take a 30th of the time to complete (or thereabouts)...

*Grammar Police Statement* - Sorry for the elision in the title, now that I know what an elision is thanks to William Sapphire.

William Safire.

DOH! Man, that was definitely a subconscious thing. I've been looking at engagement rings for the last couple of weeks. I don't think that was a coincidence.

- trs

Class of '83, man.

How about you?

Class of '83, man.

How about you?

class of '99

loved every minute of it.

glad to see a fellow Hokie here.