SillyDog701

[Antony]

"It's a shame that Apple no longer runs the 'Switch' campaign on television," writes Daniel H. Steinberg for O'Reilly Network. "Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan would make an excellent spokesperson for moving to the Mac … His ad might go something like this. 'I was in the market for a new machine. I was hoping to get ten teraflops by the end of the year. I'd never used a Mac and had been looking at Dells and IBMs. Then Apple released the G5 on June 23. A week later I bought 1,100 duals online at the Apple Store. I’m Srinidhi Varadarajan and I build Supercomputers at Virginia Tech.'"

He told the story how he got to Apple's G5s and all related things about transferring 1,100 world's fastest personal desktop computer to one of the world's fastest supercomputers in the world.

His supercomputer is now running at 9.555 teraFlops with still more tricks left. They hope to boost another 10 percent.

Full story: Confessions of the World's Largest Switcher by Daniel H. Steinberg (O'Reilly Network)

According to Nick Grundy (posted in Whirlpool Forums, AU), the world's fastest supercomputer is with NEC 'Earth Simulator' with 35.86 teraFlops, is of some 5120 NEC CPU's in Japan.
The world's second fastest supercomputer is HP 'ASCI Q' Alpha Server SC ES45 with 8192 1.25GHz Alphas, 13.88 teraFlops.
The world's largest switcher and (believed to be) Apple's happiest customer is ranking the world's third fastest supercomputer.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85.5

[Antony]

The world's third fastest supercomputer is along the cheapest and fastest to build, according to The Indian Express.
[It was built] in a record time of three months, and at record low cost of $5.2 million, using off-the-shelf components.

The tab was kept low by Varadarajan and his team by using hundreds of student volunteers, who were paid only in soda and pizza for assembling the cluster in less than a month. They ate between 600 and 700 pizzas, Dr Varadarajan, who teaches Computer Science, estimates.

Also from this News.com.au article

Virginia Tech quantum chemist Daniel Crawford said Big Mac will shorten the time he spends building computer models of chemicals from years to just days.

And of course, they are still working on their homemade programme to make the "Big Mac" think even faster.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) (CK-SillyDog)

[Edward]

Big Mac is a sandwich. How can it think?

UserAgent: Opera/7.22 (Windows 98; U) [en]

[Antony]

Now Top500.org has released the list for November 2003
Top500 List 11/2003
Rank 1:
Earth Simulator Center - Japan/2002
Earth-Simulator / 5120
NEC
Rank 2:
Los Alamos National Laboratory - United States/2002
ASCI Q - AlphaServer SC45, 1.25 GHz / 8192
HP
Rank 3:
Virginia Tech - United States/2003
1100 Dual 2.0 GHz Apple G5/Mellanox Infiniband 4X/Cisco GigE / 2200
Self-made
Rank 4:
NCSA - United States/2003
PowerEdge 1750, P4 Xeon 3.06 GHz, Myrinet / 2500
Dell
Rank 5:
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory - United States/2003
Integrity rx2600 Itanium2 1.5 GHz, Quadrics / 1936
HP

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) (CK-SillyDog)