Our final trend this month was set in motion with the recent announcement of a major technological breakthrough: a supercomputer built with off-the-shelf Macintosh processor chips.
The machine is the world’s fourth most powerful supercomputer. It was developed this fall at Virginia Tech using 2,200 PowerPC 970 processor chips, which are made by IBM for use in Apple’s G5 Macintosh computers.
According to a report in The New York Times, this computer demonstrates that the massive investments in custom-made supercomputers may have been largely a waste of time and hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s clear that, except for solving a very narrow range of problems, corporations and governments that expected to create a competitive advantage with an expensive supercomputer can be easily challenged by rivals with fewer resources.
Consider Japan’s Earth Simulator, which cost a quarter of a billion dollars. It was so expensive to build because it includes more than 5,000 custom-designed processors. Those special purpose “vector processors” were designed especially to calculate complex mathematical operations. The Earth Simulator cranked out 35.8 trillion floating point operations a second in 2002, making it the world’s fastest machine.
The supercomputer built at Virginia Tech is able to reach a speed of 7.41 trillion operations a second, or about 20 percent of the Earth Simulator’s speed. However, the slower computer costs a mere $5 million, or 2 percent of the cost of the Japanese machine. That’s an enormous (1,000%) price-performance advantage.
Part of this advantage comes from the off-the-shelf networking of parallel processors. But, an even greater factor is that it is designed to exploit new 64-bit technology.
Since the arrival of the Pentium and original Macintosh PowerPC chips in the early 1990s, computing has has been focused on 32-bit processors. This year, the G5 Mac and the new AMD Athlon 64 processors are moving us into the dramatically more powerful world of 64-bit computing. With their ability to address 16 billion gigabytes of random access memory, these processors have a huge advantage in runing applications involving enormous databases.
New releases of Mac’s OS X and a new 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows were announced at the same time as the 64-bit...
