Skip to main content

News

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 UPDATED - MWSF: Xserve cluster makes fresh UCLA milestone

Jonny Evans

  • Email to a friend
  • Print this article
  • Bookmark this page
  • RSS feed

Apple technologies have achieved a new milestone in clustering at the University of California in LA (UCLA), and has become the most efficient supercomputer in the Top500 list.

Using a cluster of 128 dual-processor 2GHz Xserve G5s, Mac OS X Server 10.3, a Cisco 6500 Gigabit switch and software from Dauger Research, scientists achieved 1.21 trillion floating-point operations per second.

Question of the day!

Mark Hattersley
Editor in Chief

Do you share your creations online?

Question of the day!

Do you share your creations online?

% of Macworld readers agree with you

Yes
TBC
No
TBC

What do you create and how do you share it?

124 characters remaining

Follow the conversation at @TabletChat

paintings & illustrations, mostly, which i upload to flickr.RT @fragmentedm

I draw manga/anime characters. I also do graphic design and photography.RT @spialelo

Yes. I usually put them up on my #deviantart account for feedback on how to improve.RT @spialelo

UCLA's Plasma Physics Group acquired the Xseves to create the new "Dawson" high-performance parallel computing cluster for plasma physics research.

They've conducted some tough calculations on that machine - including one which achieved the benchmark of over a TeraFlop, or one trillion floating-point operations per second, the Altivec Fractal. This was the largest calculation yet performed using Dauger's Pooch pro software, and put the cluster into the Top 500 Supercomputer list.

The software used also included Pooch Pro and MacMPI, the latest incarnation of AppleSeed, a project begun by physics researchers at UCLA in 1998.

Pooch introduces new technologies to access and run clusters behind firewalls and automatically access job output.

More details on this benchmark research are available online.

UPDATE: Macworld reader Norm LeMieux writes: "In perspective, the 2,200-unit cluster at Virginia Tech (System X) is listed at 20.24Tflops. This divides down to 9.2Gflops per unit (dual 2.3GHz Xserves), while the UCLA 128-unit cluster divides its 1.21Tflop performance down to 9.6Gflops per unit (dual 2GHz Xserves).

"This makes it more "efficient" than any other supercomputer in the Top 10 (for which I did this calculation). And we're not even talking about cost yet."

Email A Friend

Email this article to a friend or colleague:



PLEASE NOTE: Your name is used only to let the recipient know who sent the story, and in case of transmission error. Both your name and the recipient's name and address will not be used for any other purpose.

<<prev article | back to news index | next article>>

Latest News


More news...