The Ultimate Macintosh Switcher Story

[Epaminondas]

This guy is crazy.  But he's good crazy:

<< On June 23, Apple unveiled the G5. Varadarajan said he contacted Apple on June 26 about the possibility of using the G5 for the Terascale Computing Facility. While talking with Apple, representatives from the company asked Varadarajan how long he had been a Mac user.

"I had to tell them I'd never used the Mac," Varadarajan said. "I'm probably one of the few people who came to the platform by reading the kernel manual." >>

[sandbox]

From a different angle

http://don.cc.vt.edu/

http://computing.vt.edu/research_computing...essrelease.html

http://www.mellanox.com/news/press/pr_090203.html

QUOTE

Where do you put 1,100 G5s? The answer is not anywhere you want. The facility is housed in 3,000 square feet of Virginia Tech's 9,000-square-foot data center. Varadarajan said that they also had to build a new cooling system to cool all of the G5s as the existing AC system would have to move air in the floor at speeds exceeding 60 miles per hour to meet the cooling demand. The new cooling system works like a distributed refrigerator that uses cooled liquid fed to smaller air driven air conditioning units housed all throughout the facility. Without the cooling system, Varadarajan said that the temperature in the facility would increase to over 100 degrees within two minutes and components would be damaged within several minutes. Virginia Tech also constructed a UPS and 1.5 Megawatt backup diesel generator for the facility.


The system costs $5.2 million for the G5s, racks, cables, and Infiniband cards. Virginia Tech spent and addition $2 million on facilities, $1 million for the air conditioning system and $1 million for the UPS and generator.

http://don.cc.vt.edu/g5sinracks/slides/IMG_2355.JPG

[Gary S]

I wonder if they have to run DiskWarrior on all of them at the same time?

Like over the P. A. system , OK student workers....1, 2, 3....insert your disks now and boot with the "C" key.    

[pendragon]

Gary,  

Harv