Somewhat OT: Top 500 list

[Jack]

--- Jon Pruente wrote:

> I've read things online about Apple employees and/or
> subcontractors doing
> work for the Navy, etc. It would make sense for
> Apple to have the ability to
> build their own largescale machine to testing Xgrid
> for various "projects".
I was referring to non-vendor built supercomputers,
hence
the reason to call them homegrown. Apple does make and
market clustered MACs, just like IBM, HP and other
manufacturers do. IBM and HP have collectively ~80% of
the supercomputer market.
Cray is somewhere between 3% and 6%, although per
processor Crays seem to outperform all the others.
Crays just don't make them as big as IBM and HP. I
hear FUD coming out of M$ again about them doing a
clustered computing that will be better than the
others.
Funny how they always come out with this FUD every
time there is a new top 500 list. I see no logic in
this other than FUD. It's a very small niche market,
and will remain so. Of course with the advent of the
$100 PC, it might become feasible to expand that
market. Anyone with $30,000 could build a top 500
cluster from $100 PCs ... maybe. Realistically, though
I don't see anyone building a top 500 for less than
$150,000, including the cost of programming and
building. Tack on $100,000 - $1,000,000 for M$
licensing and I don't see where they expect to find
suckers to buy
an M$ Cluster-well-u-know version 2003 (available
sometime in 2010). That vaporware stuff is always so
nifty. 
"I don't have a running model, but if I did you'd be
like ... oooooh, aaaaaahhh!"

I wonder if we could pool every one on the KCLUG and
KULUA UGs and maybe some of the other UGs in the area,
how big of a cluster we could throw together, with
various mismatched systems. An interesting possibility
would be to build a PCMAC cluster. That would be
challenging, but probably not very efficient. Although
might have some real world uses.


Brian JD