Apple G5 aka The New Cray

I don't know about you, but I need some comfort news after that last revelation. Never fear. I have just the thing.

It's a shame that Apple no longer runs the "Switch" campaign on television. Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan would make an excellent spokesperson for moving to the Mac. Just as Ellen Feiss' switcher story was the hit at Macworld Expo, so has been Dr. Varadarajan's presentation at the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference, where he received a standing ovation.

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."

TEN TERAFLOPS! I actually have no idea what that means in real life, but it does leave the impression of speed like an Indy racer, No?

Varadarajan said that a lot of people get the math wrong when calculating the performance of the machines. Each G5 processor has two, double-precision, floating-point units. Each is capable of a fused, multiple-add operation per cycle, so you get 2 flops per cycle. This means that 2GHz corresponds to 8 GFlops, so each dual G5 can deliver a peak of 16 GFlops of double-precision performance. That is more than a modern Cray node.

I'd never attempt the math myself, but more than a Cray? You mean the same Cray whose computers we couldn't sell internationally without government blessing because we wanted to keep our technological edge, right?

Varadarajan reported that "our latest numbers are 9.555 tera and we still have more tricks left. We are hoping for another 10 percent boost to become the first academic machine to cross 10 tera. The last ratings put us at number three worldwide."

Number 3 in the world. With G5's he bought at the Apple store.

There's a ton of good techie details in the full article.

I feel so, so........validated.

DC

Comments

[Steve Gigl]

Just because I'm a nerd: 1 FLOPS = 1 FLoating-point (refers to the way a computer represents non-integer numbers) Operations Per Second

A TeraFLOPS would be one trillion floating-point operations per second (or 2^40 flops, which is pretty close).

[Ant]

Dv,

I've always held Microsoft in disdain ever since their miserable attempts at mimicking Apple's OS with Windows and for releasing software before all obvious bugs are worked out. This continued with the bundling of software and adding bells and whistles that only 1% of users will be able to use 50% of the b-n-w. Meanwhile, required disk space grows inversely proportional to the utility of these b-n-w, not to mention their susceptibility to hackers.

The problem is that Apple adopted a closed system model while Microsoft chose the open system approach, which gave them scale and hence cheaper accessories (I use the term loosely). Cheaper products are more appealing to the masses. So are bad software.

When I started school again, I bought a Mac for its power and simplicity. Unfortunately, I couldn't swap files with my classmates very easily so I ended up having to buy a clone. Another 1200 reasons for hating Bill.

I used to root for Andy Grove to take down Bill. My classmates and colleagues know I'm always on the lookout for some smart people to form a company to take down MS, or at least put a dent in them some way. It's a pipe dream, but I'm still young, - or at least that's what I tell myself.

Hey, at the least, may be we'll make a bundle as Bill decides to buy out those he cannot beat. I bet Bill makes a great poker player by saying "Pot it."

Keep posting about Bill and you can almost always get a response out of me. But I'll probably sound like a broken record by then.

[brett]

yes, more evidence that Macs are the coolest personal computers on the planet (at least now that NEXT has been reduced to a question in Trivial Pursuit)

personally, I think Bill might finally be vulnerable.. rumor has it, he's thinking of making a bid on Google when it goes public.. I think Google might be able to buy MS, instead!

[lane]

it is always nice to read stories like this. i have been having so much fun with my G5 at work since i got it. it starts up so fast and launches my four start up applications before i even have time to take my coat off.

one is nice, but i'd sure like to have 1100 of them.

[DC]

Ant,

We've run our business on Macs forever. Many of our customers are large international corporations. I find I don't have any problems with software compatability as long as I have Office and Acrobat.

In my experience this covers 95% of files transferred. The other files I get are engineering files. I can get by without having CAD software.

DC