The Hindu : Cost-competitive supercomputing

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Oct 24, 2003

Business

Business

Cost-competitive supercomputing

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE OCT. 23. Need a teraflop super computer — but can't spare the $50 -100 million these machines typically cost? Not to worry! Let's try to string together a thousand Apple Macintosh personal computers and achieve the same performance. This daring vision suggested by an Indian computer expert has just been realised by a group of students in an American university, working with him — and their machine will vie for a top slot when the "Top 500'' list of the world's most powerful computers is officially released in a few weeks.

Srinidhi Varadarajan, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Head of the Terascale Computing Facility at the Virgina Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, U.S., initiated the venture where 1100 units of the dual-processor Apple `PowerMac G5' PC were strung together in a cluster and computed 7.41 trillion operations per second (teraflops).

This would make it fourth in the current ranking of the world's 500 most powerful computers — the fastest is the Japanese Earth Simulator which achieves 35.8 teraflops.

Dr. Varadarajan is the author of a prize winning software package called "Déjà vu'' which provides stable operations to such large clusters of computers and incidentally fuels the Virgina Tech configuration.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Business