Energy Dept. to unveil details on supercomputer effort

The U. S. Department of Energy's Office of Science on or around April 15 will announce the winner of a competition to develop a center for creating a supercomputer that can churn more than 100 trillion calculations. Such a computer would be more powerful than NEC's Earth Simulator. Earth Simulator, which graphically represents global weather patterns, has reignited much of the supercomputer nationalism that existed back in the '80s, according to many observers.

The DOE did not state which institutions are in the running for the center, but sources indicate that the list includes various research universities.

Mac cluster?

Va Tech's mac cluster does 10 teraflops, comes in at number 3
on the supercomputer list, and only at 5 million dollars or so.

I know the scaling's not linear, but for argument's sake, for 100
teraflops, that's 50 million and change for 11,000 G5 X-Serves.
Add 5 million for extra ECC RAM, racks and cooling, a couple of
million for installation, cabling, wiring, etc., couple of million for
InfiniBand networking, and just for grins, add 20 million more
for the unexpecteds (lack of linear scaling, gov't cost over-runs,
software porting, whatever).

You've got the most powerful supercomputing cluster for about
$75 million. Sounds cheap, even for just bragging rights. :)