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.
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?
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.
The two telecom carriers will carry a next-generation iPad running on the fast, next-generation wireless technology, sources tell The Wall Street Journal.
Google creates an animated doodle that features a boy, a girl, Google's search engine, and a jump rope. But might there be darker, more analytical, more troubling interpretations to this tale?
Hamza Kashgari's tweets of an imaginary conversation with the Prophet Mohammad are viewed as blasphemous by the Saudi Arabian government. Now he faces trial with a possible death sentence.
The Silicon Valley online payments startup grew by 1,000 percent last year and is hopeful it can repeat that level of growth this year. To do that, it's had to move away from its early friends-and-family roots and embrace small businesses.
Chamtech's spray-on antenna uses a nano material to provide a low-power boost to antenna range. The wireless-in-a-can product may some day bring an end to unsightly cell towers.
EnerG2 opens a plant to make an engineered carbon that will improve performance of energy storage devices and make storage for start-stop hybrid cars less expensive.
So what? Is this the state of innovation in academia?
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.