Cheers
Well we could guesstimate what it could be, nothing like going hypothetical and extrapolating wildy on macrumors.com
The original was 1,100 standard desktop Power Mac G5s. By upgrading to 1,100 dual 2.3GHz Xserve G5s, they made it 15% faster. (Apparently doing so after "negotiating an exclusive deal with Apple to produce the custom built Macs"
reference)
The rebuild cost $600,000, and they got 50 additional nodes within that price. (Apple didn't offer 2.3 GHz XServes till 2005 for other people).
The 2000 2.0 GHz was pushing out ~4.5 GigaFLoPs
(Aside: XServes insides - they are good enough to be reminded about
here
Current system if they went XServe today with $6 million:
Lets max it out at the Apple Store:
1,100 XServes:
# Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8-core)
# 8GB (4x2GB) (They go BTO up to 32GB)
80GB Serial ATA ADM
# Quad-channel 4Gb Fibre Channel card with PCI Express x16 riser
XSan 2
Some bits & bobs comes to around $11,000 an XServe
$6 million over $11,000 gives you about 545 of current day XServes, and a RAID susbstem thrown on top to make up the difference
545 of these could churn out ~ <insert>Teraflops.
Other systems include UCLA's 128-Dual-processor G5 Xserves called the "Dawson" Cluster and got 1.21 TeraFlops. (what they do with it
here)
Some XServe reviews:
here,
Harpertown 2008 review
here
Tom Yager:
But the sum of Xserve's flaws is overwhelmed by the system's unique leading-edge, user and administrator-centric engineering. Xserve is far better than the commodity server that the Intel x86 market expects. But what really blasts Apple's competition is OS X Server. The present Tiger (10.4) release is more than a match for much more expensive commercial Linux, and far more capable out of the box than Windows 2003 Server. Early next year, OS X Server Leopard (10.5) will transform Apple's already industry-leading Xserve, including the model reviewed here, into an unimaginably feature-rich native 64-bit server platform. And guess what? When you buy it, you're done paying for it, and all of the services you have to buy, build or rent with Windows, Linux or pay-as-you-go service outsourcing, are installed on every Xserve's boot drive. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer Xserve's buy once, run forever approach.
Other possibilities - Server coming to models below the Mac Pro? Of note - If a Mac Pro could be a Server with Leopard, could a late 08 or 09 iMac, or low end Mac Pro, or high end Mac mini take on that role? Apple wants 64-bit through and through - it's got the Open Group Unix certification for Leopard - so where will it go with Snow Leopard? Presumably that power could make lower end models do more things.
One area not really covered in the press yet, is that servers, alongside gamers, consumers, and pros, could get a real big juicy performance boost from Snow Leopard. And so the XServe may well be pushed to the fore a bit more than Apple's usual quiet reticence. IT does look rich but simple and powerful) - there are seemingly a lot of folks who actually are averse to this! Anyhow, just another area of Snow Leopard, which ties in with HPC. As far as I can see, OS X Server really is a great server app platform.
Will Apple be able to get it out to market before Vista is dispatched at Redmond, and Windows 7 is rolled out? WIth virtualisation, it might be a very interesting prospect for Small to Medium Businesses to run XP / Vista on virtualisation, and use an OS Server (especially with the price difference on licensing (though if anyone has a critique on that, please correct me!)) (From
here it seems you could run under virtualisation on the server, WIndows Server 203 if you wanted to. Consolidating Windows servers with Xserve.
<to be filled in>
I can see a bit why they would have gone XServe over using all those Macs - Space and simplicity for one. It would be interesting to see the performance per buck comparing a cluster using say mac minis/PowerMacs, versus XServes. But that's another time.
(From this quote: "Squeezing as many cores and DIMM sockets as possible into one rack unit isn't a priority when you're scaling out for fine-grained load balancing and minimal response time to requests from users." Maybe Snow Leopard Server will be a quiet revolution. The current Leopard Server software seems seemingly nearly as easy to use as Leopard itself? Anyone agree, disagree, or see where Snow Leopard could
improve? Will Apple push CalDAV? Will they do a demo like
this again (6 min 50 in)? Will they open up from intranet to internet?
Having relooked at the SL Server page they actually are touting quite a few features of how Snow Leopard will really mesh with iPhones -
e.g.
Remote Access
Secure remote access to your business network has never been more critical than in today’s increasingly mobile world. Snow Leopard Server delivers push notifications to mobile users outside your firewall, and a proxy service gives them secure remote access to email, address book contacts, calendars, and select internal websites.
This could be just as much for iPhones/Touches as general Macs. For me, one of the really big uses would be to be able to assign rooms in a building to have a calendar/some similar system - to then be able to access that on the phone, and book a room - then send that information as an invite. (Redmond has it - from an old Scoble video showing them demoing their new building).
- Make the wiki/blog /podcast facilities front ended? The SL page shows a wiki running through an iPhone, so what gives?
- iCal Server 2 means calendaring & scheduling service to the iPhone - including "group and shared calendars, push notifications, the ability to send email invitations to non-iCal Server users, and a browser-based application that lets users access their calendars on the web when they’re away from their Mac.
- Address Book Server bringing to the iPhone the ability to "remotely access contact information without the schema limitations and security issues associated with LDAP"
- Could you actually push a podcast from the iPhone? Record it with a mic in, then wifi it out? It seems nearly doable - would be big for podcasting.
Heck - on the back of this, we have to remember that iPhone v3 may very well be coming quite close to WWDC 2009. i.e. the summer of 2009, where we'll have Nehalem, Snow Leopard, and maybe even an ACD/mac mini refresh.
Genius?
As an aside - Genius - Having been sorting out some of my Music Library - Will iTunes X bring decent tagging features? It would be interesting to find oiut how it works (just ID metadata? Guessing it isn't a musical fingerprint currently).
