The Mac-based Virginia Tech supercomputers ↦

Stephen Hackett has a great, in-depth history of that time Virginia Tech built one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers out of Macs—twice: Tech tore down the Power Mac version of System X in January 2004 and rebuilt it with Xserve G5s that summer. ECC memory was a big part of the reason. As the school put it: “We needed to upgrade the system to something with error correcting code (ECC) RAM. The Power Macs did not support it and the XServes were coming.” The new array was made up of 1,100 dual 2.3 GHz Xserve G5 servers and six Xserve RAIDs. Those 2.3 GHz machines were custom-built by Apple for Virginia Tech; the public wouldn’t be able to buy one until January 2005. Each one had 4 GB of that sweet, sweet ECC RAM and an 80 GB Serial ATA drive. I love the extra mile Stephen went with the research on this one. Featuring some never-before-seen photos!