A few weeks ago I wrote of the semi-annual ranking of “supercomputers” called the “Top 500 List”, maintained by the University of Mannheim (Germany) and the University of Tennessee (Tennessee). Well, the results are in. The entry from Virginia Tech University, officially named the Terascale Cluster X (dubbed by some “Big Mac”), placed third on the list. Not bad, for a cluster built with 1100 “out of the box” Apple PowerMac G5s, with the same Dual - 2GHz processor configuration, and running basically the same Mac OS X operating system, that you can run at home (with a few networking add-ons to allow each computer to share in the tasks at hand). The Big Mac final numbers came in a 10.28 teraflops, or 10.28 trillion calculations per second.

Atop the Top 500 list is Japan’s Earth Simulator, with over 5000 processors and 35+ teraflops of power. In second is a dedicated weapons computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, able to handle 13.9 teraflops. For some perspective on how rapidly supercomputing has advanced, the No. 500 computer this time has double the computing power of the last survey’s No. 500.

Want to get into some of the power of the “Big Mac”? Apple has made it easier (on the pocketbook, anyway). The entry-level PowerMac G5, with a single 1.6 GHz G5 processor, has dropped $200 in price, down to $1799. If you’re using, say, a beige or blue PowerMac G3, or an older single-processor G4 tower, and already have a monitor, the new price point should be appealing.

If you need the extra “oomph” of a second processor, look at the new Dual-1.8GHz PowerMac G5 variant, with most of the powerful subsystems of the Dual-2GHz flagship model. The Dual-1.8 retails for $2499, which is the same price as the previous single-1.8 model. Wow – a second processor, for free!

Apple’s top-of-the-line iMac model got more screen real estate this week – a new 20-inch (measured diagonally) widescreen display. The new display’s max resolution is 1680 x 1050 (more than 1.7 million pixels), which gives it 124% more viewing area than a standard 15-inch display, and 36% more viewing area than a standard 17-inch display. The “guts” of the 20-inch model remain the same as its 17” sibling, and the price is $2199.

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski