Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler OFF TOPIC - Who owns an Apple macintosh too?

I had an LC for years. The closet is where those poor, crippled beasties belong. I upgraded to the maximum amount of ram and added a coprocessor about 2 months before I bought a 9500. Then I waited 7 more years to buy a G4. About 2 months before they announced the G5s. Gah.

Peter I think the key word there was economic...supercomputers don't count as economic

They do when they cost $5 mil instead of $30 mil (pulled second number out of my hat...) and beat all but 2 machines on the list.

First let me say, it is an impressive machine built very inexpensively, especially compared to the $250mil #1 on the list.

The thing about the $5mil claim is that it's literally the cost of the hardware. They built it themselves, using student labor (trust me, student researchers don't get paid much at all...grad student stipends are laughable compared to industry salary.) When they ordered those processors, Apple had to delay the release of the g5 bcause they wouldn't have enough of them! (Just a funny side-note)

Supercomputer pricing is an odd thing, if you do some searching online regarding the amd opteron and supercomputers, you'll find that Univ. of Utah picked up 1000 Opterons for $2mil, and are working on a supercomputer. Also the number 6 computer on the list (opteron based) cost slightly under $10mil on a contract including the hardware, labor, maitenence, and an upgrade down the road adding another ~120 nodes. It's hard to say how much of that contract was hardware, but I would be surprised if it were more than $3mil. When you think about Utah's 1000 Opterons costing $2mil it's likely that Los Alamo's 1100 Opterons cost a similar amount. And that $10mil price includes more hardare upgrades that haven't been installed yet.

So whenever a university lists the cost for something, you have to be very wary of comparing it to a professional contract job including all kinds of support and professional labor costs.

And here's a scientific benchmark that actually compares applications that someone is using:

http://www.hs.uni-hamburg.de/EN/For/ThA/phoenix/computing.html

Eeenteresting...

I'd say that the Athlon64 and G5 are pretty darn similar, speed wise. Yes, the G5 was a dual, and the Athlon was a single.

Gaaahhhh! Enough already! My hammer is faster than your hammer!