763 The COLSA Corporation has announced the purchase of 1,566 dual processor G5 XServes, which they plan to turn into a supercomputer cluster expected to rank among the world's fastest, with an estimated performance of 25 Tflops per second.

Apple seems happy:

"Apple is honored that COLSA chose the Xserve G5 to build their
supercomputer cluster," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of
Worldwide Product Marketing. "The ground breaking 64-bit performance and
incredible I/O capabilities of the Xserve G5, combined with the reliability
and scalability of our UNIX-based Mac OS X Server software deliver high
performance computing solutions perfect for anyone looking to cluster from two
to thousands of nodes, at an unbeatable price."

And what does COLSA do? Produce heartwarming family films? Er, not exactly:

The Xserve G5 supercluster system is expected to be on-line and working
for the Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center
(AMRDEC) division of the US Army Research and Development Command by late
Fall.

This is great news for Apple all around, so naturally Cnet uses it as a chance to take swipes at Apple.

A U.S. Army contractor has purchased a $5.8 million, 1,566-server supercomputer from Apple Computer, a real-world cousin to an academic system that briefly appeared high on a list of the most powerful machines.

...

System X, which vanished from the most recent list for upgrades, had sustained performance of 10.3 trillion calculations per second, or "teraflops."

And they're right. System X isn't on the list of the world's Top 500 Supercomputers. That's because System X doesn't exist anymore, as Cnet bloody well knows. It was disassembled so that it could be replaced with a system made up of XServe G5s, which weren't available at the time.

MacCentral also has the story:

"We did about a year and a half of research on a variety of processors before making our decision," Dr Anthony DiRienzo, executive vice president at COLSA Corp., told MacCentral. "We did a best value competition and Apple won that competition. It was based on performance; the facility (power requirements, floor space etc.); cost; and an assessment of vendor stability. We solicited to six companies and they won."

The supercomputer, named MACH 5, is expected to deliver peak performance capability of more than 25 TFlops/second. In comparison, the Virginia Tech supercomputer announced last year attained sustained performance of approximately 10 TFlops/second, according to Apple director of product management, server hardware, Alex Grossman.

Aaaah. That feels better.

Bill's been using Macs since the late 80s. When he's not making smartass remarks to amuse Kirk Hiner, he enjoys fighting for the user.

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