...from: http://www.colsa.com/cover_page/news_front/news_details/news_details.htm

COLSA Corporation of Huntsville, AL and Apple Computer Corporation of Cupertino, CA jointly announce the acquisition of one of the largest and most powerful computers in the world. COLSA has contracted with Apple to deliver for COLSA’s government customer, the Aviation and Missile Research, Development, and Engineering Center (AMRDEC), the components for a supercluster computer system with more than 3000 processors. The system will consist of 1566 dual-processor, rack-mountable Xserve G5 units. These units employ Apple’s new 2.0 GHz G5 CPU, one of the most powerful processors in the new generation of 64-bit computer chips. COLSA will build, install, test, and operate the Apple Computer component supercluster computer system for its Army customer.

The new system will be delivered to COLSA’s Hypersonic Missile Technology facility located at its newly renovated Research & Operations Center in Huntsville in June. The supercluster will be employed to model the complex aero-thermodynamics of hypersonic flight, including applications related to missile interceptors and scramjet engine performance.

At its peak, the new supercluster has a performance capability of greater than 25 TFlop/s, meaning that it is capable of calculating more than 25 trillion floating point operations per second. A floating point operation, or Flop, represents an arithmetical operation on a pair of numbers and is a standard performance measure for scientific computing.

On the basis of this performance capability the system would rank as the one of the most powerful computer on the planet as measured by the TOP500 List (on the net at www.top500.org). On today’s TOP500 listing, the new supercluster would be second only to Japan’s 40 Tflop/s, $350 million dollar Earth Simulator computer. At approximately $5 million dollars for 25 Tflop/s, the system will set a new price-performance standard for high-end scientific computing.

The Xserve G5 supercluster system is expected to be on-line and in production for work by COLSA’s Research, Development and Engineering Center (RDEC) customer of the Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM), located at Redstone Arsenal, AL by late Fall of this year. This acquisition is the second phase of a multi year COLSA program to create a center of excellence in Huntsville for computational modeling and simulation. Through the continued efforts of Senator Richard Shelby, (R.), AL, a long term supporter of bringing this advanced capability to Huntsville, the new system will benefit both the U.S. Army and NASA for the National Aerospace Initiative and their research and development objectives.

============================= ...from: http://www.thinksecret.com/news/ucla.html

UCLA Plasma Physics to create 256 Xserve G5 cluster July 5, 2004 - By Andrew Feder, Contributing Editor

According to officials, UCLA's Plasma Physics Group recently purchased some 256 Xserve G5s and is in the process of building a Virginia Tech-style parallel super computing cluster. The cluster will employ 256 Dual G5 Xserves running Mac OS X Server to form a 512-processor parallel supercomputing cluster. The cluster is being deployed for Plasma Physicist Warren Mori by a team at UCLA Academic Technology Services led by IT Infrastructure manager Bill Labate.

The cluster's estimated cost is close to $1 million, which was largely funded by a grant to Mori from the National Science Foundation. Mori proposed the cluster in October 2003, at which point many platforms were evaluated. Xserves running Mac OS X Server proved to be the most cost-effective, straightforward and appropriate choice for the application, plasma physics research.

Officials with the "Dawson Project," as it is known, told Think Secret that the cluster is currently under construction and that the Xserves are arriving in groups. The team has been installing the Xserves for the last few weeks, and expects the cluster to be up in running in another couple of weeks as the remainder of the servers arrive.

The Dawson team has received some, if not all of its Xserves (pictured below) despite heavy demand and shipping delays on the dual servers. As Think Secret recently reported, Apple is on the verge of quelling the harsh backlog on dual Xserve orders.

UCLA Physics is no newcomer to parallel computing with Macs. In 2002 a group working with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory created a parallel computing cluster using 33 dual-processor 1GHz Xserves to achieve over 217 Gigaflops. The cluster used Pooch and MacMPI X, a development of AppleSeed, an ongoing project begun by physics researchers at UCLA in 1998.

Earlier this month, the COLSA Corporation announced the building of "Mach 5," a Mac OS-based supercomputer cluster which is expected to be one of the fastest in the world. The cluster is to be made up of 1566 dual-processor Xserve G5 1U rackmounted servers and is expected to perform at over 25 Tflops/seconds. Mach 5 will be used by the US Army, at a cost of $5.8 million, to model the complex aero-thermodynamics of hypersonic flight. Mach 5 is expected to rank as one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet, according to the June 2004 Top 500 supercomputers list. Mach 5 will rank second to Japan's $350 million Earth Simulator.

Although the Plasma Physics Group's cluster pales in comparison to Virginia Tech and COLSA's, it is another step in the right direction for Apple as it vies for market share in the higher education arena. We are beginning to see, albeit slowly, the introduction of Mac OS-based servers into industry, government, and higher education as Apple makes inroads in these deeply sought after markets.