Apple Cluster Seminar Recap

I attended a very informative seminar held by Apple Computer on High Performance Computing in the Sciences. The speakers were Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, Director of the Terascale Computing Facility at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Kevin Kelleher, a sys admin from Mt. Sinai Medical Center, Mark McInnis from Apple, and two speakers from Etnus, makers of the TotalView Debugger.

My overall impressions are:

1. System X is a hot machine.
With 1100 Dual Processor 2.3 GHz Apple Xserve servers, System X is #7 on the Top 500 Supercomputer List and is capable of 12.25 Teraflops. It's also hot in temperature -- VA Tech had to spend $500K on a Liebert XDV (extreme-density vertical cooling) system to keep System X from overheating. If the cooling system fails it takes only seconds for the computer room to reach 150 degrees F.

2. System X is affordable.
VA Tech paid about $5.7 million for System X. This figure is well within reach for many academic and government institutions as well as corporate budgets.

3. System X is easy to use.
Using Mac OS X Panther, the basic interface to the cluster is the user friendy Mac UI that we all know and love. There is a lot of software available for OS X, probably more scientific programs are available for OS X right now than for Itanium 2. There is MPI support, great math libraries, and of course, OS X is really a FreeBSD variant, so all the Unix tools are there as well!

If you want to know more about System X, see:
http://www.tcf.vt.edu

If you want to know more about the Apple Xserve G5, see:
http://www.apple.com/xserve/