Canadian university buys Dell supercomputer

The Universite de Sherbrooke in Quebec has purchased a 2,024-processor supercomputing cluster from Dell for $7 million, the computer maker said Wednesday. The system, which uses Red Hat's version of Linux, is expected to have a peak performance of 13.9 trillion calculations per second, though actual performance is typically considerably lower.

The system uses 872 Dell PowerEdge 750 servers, which are 1.75-inch-tall rack-mounted models with single 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processors, and 576 PowerEdge SC1425 servers, which are the same height but use dual 64-bit Intel Xeon 3.6GHz processors. Extreme Networks and TopSpin supplied networking switches to join the systems into a shared computing resource.

Factual error

The Université de Sherbrooke is in Sherbrooke, Quebec, NOT
Toronto.

[Wingsy]

They Coulda Had a V-8

Wow, seven million $$$ got em 13.9 TFlops (and that's PEAK). For
5 million (or less) they could have done what VA Tech did and get
20.24 TFlops, ranked 7th in the TOP500 last I checked. In case you
missed that, VA's "System-X" has 1100 Mac Xserve systems (2200
64-bit G5 processors). Wonder why Sherbrooke wanted to pay
more for less?

um, cause their French

Just kidding. Most IT types simply refuse to believe Apple/Mac is a
real solution, facts be damned.