COLSA Corp. Buys 1566 Apple Dual G5 Xserves for 25 TeraFLOP Cluster Supercomputer

according to this Yahoo News article. It will cost less than $6 million to assemble and will be used to model aero-thermodynamics of hypersonic flight for the U.S. Army. At 25 TF, it could rank right behind Japan's Earth Simulator which at 36 TF currently ranks first in the world. However, more clusters are being built using Intel processors including one for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that may be 10 times Japans Earth Simulator according to this MacCentral article. Still, the Mac systems seem to be more cost effective, at least to those who have done an analysis:

"We evaluated PC-based proposals from other vendors but none came close to delivering either the price, performance or manageability of the Apple Xserve G5," stated a COLSA executive.

One wonders why our tax dollars are being wasted on so many Intel-based clusters if the COLSA analysis is correct. [Dana Baggett]