--- Jon Pruente wrote:
I've read things online about Apple employees and/or subcontractors doing work for the Navy, etc. It would make sense for Apple to have the ability to build their own largescale machine to testing Xgrid for various "projects".
I was referring to non-vendor built supercomputers, hence the reason to call them homegrown. Apple does make and market clustered MACs, just like IBM, HP and other manufacturers do. IBM and HP have collectively ~80% of the supercomputer market. Cray is somewhere between 3% and 6%, although per processor Crays seem to outperform all the others. Crays just don't make them as big as IBM and HP. I hear FUD coming out of M$ again about them doing a clustered computing that will be better than the others. Funny how they always come out with this FUD every time there is a new top 500 list. I see no logic in this other than FUD. It's a very small niche market, and will remain so. Of course with the advent of the $100 PC, it might become feasible to expand that market. Anyone with $30,000 could build a top 500 cluster from $100 PCs ... maybe. Realistically, though I don't see anyone building a top 500 for less than $150,000, including the cost of programming and building. Tack on $100,000 - $1,000,000 for M$ licensing and I don't see where they expect to find suckers to buy an M$ Cluster-well-u-know version 2003 (available sometime in 2010). That vaporware stuff is always so nifty. "I don't have a running model, but if I did you'd be like ... oooooh, aaaaaahhh!"
I wonder if we could pool every one on the KCLUG and KULUA UGs and maybe some of the other UGs in the area, how big of a cluster we could throw together, with various mismatched systems. An interesting possibility would be to build a PCMAC cluster. That would be challenging, but probably not very efficient. Although might have some real world uses.
Brian JD