SOUPED UP SUPERCOMPUTER

BUILDING ONE OF the world's fastest supercomputers using readily available components, and on a budget of $5.2 million, is an amazing achievement. But doing it within a three-week period is nothing short of phenomenal. Yet faculty and students at Virginia Tech's school of engineering accomplished both feats late last year. Using 1,100, 64-bit Apple Macintosh computers, the team's cobbled-together cluster was certified as reaching a speed of 10.28 teraflops (one teraflop equals a trillion operations a second), a velocity surpassed by only two other supercomputers. "It's also the first academic computer to break through the 10 teraflop barrier," says Hassan Aref, the school's clean. The school approached Apple last june, shortly after the company introduced a new desktop, the G5 Power Mac. Apples don't come cheap, but the company gives academic purchasers a discount, and that made them affordable. The Virginia Tech cluster uses Apple's Mac OS X operating system; most supercomputers run on Linux or Unix systems.

The low-cost triumph is sure to shake things up in the land of ultra-speedy computing. Most supercomputers take years to manufacture and cost between $100 million to $250 million. Even other cluster machines tend to cost much more. The one at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, which has a speed of 7.63 tcraflops, cost an estimated $10 million to $15 million to construct. Virginia Tech's group worked long hours to get the job done quickly. Student volunteers were fueled by free pizza. The job would have been completed even more rapidly if the sun hadn't interfered. Eighteen of the Macs were temporarily knocked out when a geomagnetic storm caused by a massive solar flare bombarded Karth last October.

Copyright American Society for Engineering Education Jan 2004
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