Gadgetopia

‘Big Mac’ supercomputer one of world’s fastest: Fast and cheap — the Pam Anderson of supercomputers.

“A supercomputer built by Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University from 1,100 dual-processor Macintosh G5 PCs looks likely to rank with the five fastest machines in the world, despite costing a relative pittance.

In preliminary performance tests carried out on 2,112 of the system’s 2,200 processors, the so-called ‘Big Mac’ cluster achieved 8.1 teraflops, or trillions of operations per second, according to figures published on Wednesday. The system is still being tuned, and final results won’t be announced until next month, but the performance figure would place the Big Mac at No. 4 on the list of the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers.”