Illinois university sets up Mac cluster

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has become the latest college to set up a big cluster of Xserve computers. The school's Turing Xserve cluster consists of 640 dual-2GHz processor Xserve servers, each with 4GB of memory and running Mac OS X server.

The biggest cluster to date is Virginia Tech's 1,150-node System X, which is among the top 10 in a key ranking of the world's supercomputers.

Universities can buy Macs and network them

I don't understand what the big deal really is. I never read about scientific and engineering breakthroughs, only University of Y bought a Mac cluster.

So what? Is this the state of innovation in academia?

It's basic economics

What these Universities have found is a real break for price/performance. Buying hundreds of Mac Servers and using Apple's FREE clustering software is a really good deal, and the speed is incredible. Not to mention the reliablility is much better than traditional PC servers, and OS-X's UNIX core is less prone to *ware and viruses. OS-X is network compliant with other OS's too.

So it's a great deal for research and development, and a break for overpaying students. What's the downside? I don't see one.