60 Teraflop Barn Raising Today

[lafinfil]

Shut up and hand me a #!*%'in patch cable ! ! (too bad they're not macs) http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2008a/08050...Local.html



WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - The largest supercomputer on a Big Ten campus will be installed at Purdue
in a single-day, electronic "barn-raising."

More than 200 employees will gather May 5 to help build the massive machine, which will be
about the size of a semitrailer when installed. It will be the largest Big Ten supercomputer
that is not part of a national center.

[rgG]

[Jimmypoo]

It HAD to be Dells.

What if it had been 812 (or 1000) 8 core Xeon Macs??

You'd think they'd be competitive (Apple) for installations such as this.

Amazing that Control Data computer had 1/3rd of a megaflop. The CUBE
was the first to hit a gigaflop.

What in the hell was the first Apple 128k (or just a 68000 in an SE box with 4MB of RAM?)

Surely it had to beat the stuffing out of that Control Data 6500.... (which I swear was still there when I was there. The PDP and the relatively new Vax 11/780 were there, which is a piece of crap now... selling used, for about the same as a Pismo! But you need a UHaul to move the fridge sized beast.

Mini-computer, indeed!

[bazookaman]

[quote rgG]
You be careful out among the English.

[lafinfil]

[quote Jimmypoo]It HAD to be Dells.

What if it had been 812 (or 1000) 8 core Xeon Macs??

You'd think they'd be competitive (Apple) for installations such as this.
I know a guy that was pretty high up in IT there and we had a discussion about the x-Serves
and super computers being built out of them, when they first came out.

He commented that Dell gave the IT departments tons of stuff for "free" or deeply discounted
and in exchange Dell got all the contracts for departmental computers.

I have a sister and brother in law that both work for the university and one bro-in-law thar used to.
My sister was given a mac (at her request) but it was bought through a grant for the project
that she was hired to manage (so it was IT hands off) When she worked in a different department
a few years back they were transitioning from all macs to Dells.

My brother in law that used to work for them had a Dell laptop that broke.
Under the IT contract his department was forced to repair a three year old laptop nearly at the cost
of replacing it with a brand new one .... at the normal consumer price.

Insult to injury - the universities departmental price from Dell was higher than the consumer could by at.

Free servers indeed.

[Jimmypoo]

I saw them pull the same stunts in Broward County FL school system, DESPITE the Board's mandate that all schools be Apple, Dell started pushing money at principals to over-ride that decision on a school basis -- especially to those who were retiring that year.

It's a dirty county already -- and Broward is the 5th largest school system in the nation, and the largest fully accredited system in the US. The rest of the county offices were suddenly showing up with Dells in the libraries, courthouse, etc.

Perhaps profits have been down lately because they have been going to bribes?