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Virginia Tech PowerMac G5 to Xserve G5 Upgrade
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Dear VT,
I don't need a G5 tower. I repeat. I don't need a G5 tower. My 12" powerbook is just fine.
Thank you,
Underpaid Colorado Teacher
PS Never hurts to try. 🙂
I don't need a G5 tower. I repeat. I don't need a G5 tower. My 12" powerbook is just fine.
Thank you,
Underpaid Colorado Teacher
PS Never hurts to try. 🙂
The most likely distribution of the old G5s will be to departments within the university. Virginia has budget laws and included in those is that all machinery sold by the university to private/commercial organizations must be 5 or more years old, and not needed/requested by any other department in the university. I have my doubts that they will send them back to apple as well because of the insane amount of paperwork that comes with state purchases.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this deal was significantly aided by Apple's desire to show off that many xserves. To that end, I am guessing that Apple gave them a sweet deal on the upgrade, but perhaps more important to this forum, my guess is that Apple will be taking the G5 towers back, doing a refurbish, and selling them through their retail chain and the Apple Online store.
Mr. Anderson
Moderator emeritus
What I'm wondering at is if they'll end up getting more than 1100 - they have the room for it, why not?
Is there anyone who's a student at VTech here? The PowerMac's might go for sale on campus first.
D
Is there anyone who's a student at VTech here? The PowerMac's might go for sale on campus first.
D
ahem... I am a student at VT, i doubt they will be sold because of the budget laws surrounding all state property (see my post a few posts up). Trust me, they wont be sold, and the likelyhood of them being sent back to apple is also fairly low (but definitely more likely than them being sold.)
mrsebastian
macrumors 6502a
since the xserve is smaller and consumes less power, i wonder if they wouldn't try to make it an even better super computer? how sweet would that be? the worlds fastest super computer, built with off the shelf parts, at a much lower cost than anyone else, and it's a mac 😀
TEG
macrumors 604
I'd like to see VT fill all the current Racks with XServes, trippling the computing power with at least 3300 XServes, and one Power Mac G5 for the Administrator Station. That would be awesome. Now only if they were to use if for Folding and SETI, that would be awesome.
I heard about a few years ago, some engineers at work got in trouble for Running SETI@Home on our "big" machines, but they were completing work units in like an hour. I also heard rumors of them using one for a CS server, untill a Techie tracked down all the extra network traffic to their Laptops in their Cubes.
We should pool our money (like $30 each) and get Arn a G5 from VT. Just a thought.
TEG
I heard about a few years ago, some engineers at work got in trouble for Running SETI@Home on our "big" machines, but they were completing work units in like an hour. I also heard rumors of them using one for a CS server, untill a Techie tracked down all the extra network traffic to their Laptops in their Cubes.
We should pool our money (like $30 each) and get Arn a G5 from VT. Just a thought.
TEG
I'm sure a driving reason to upgrade now is ECC memory on the XServe. Also, it will be interesting to see if the space/power savings translates into expanding the number of nodes.
I could use one of the G5s myself. My question is, "Hey VT need some help putting the XServes together like the PowerMacs?" 😀
Snowy_River
macrumors 68030
I think that an important question is where the money came from for the purchase. It may not, technically, be state money. Not if it came from a grant. And, therefore, it may not be governed by the budget laws. So, there are many more variables going on here than we know about, and I don't think the question is as straight forward as it might seem.
Snowy_River
macrumors 68030
Off topic, but, I'm curious about your sig.
What makes you say this?
I'd offer a word of caution. In these polarized times, a statement like this could easily be taken as very insulting.
What makes you say this?
I'd offer a word of caution. In these polarized times, a statement like this could easily be taken as very insulting.
A cluster is a completly different thing to a Supercomputer (CRAY etc..) I agree clusters have been catching up but in terms of memory bandwidth, latency, io bandwidth, a cluster will never compare. That cluster may seem cheap at the begining but have it run for a few years and it eventually ends up costing more than a super computer from CRAY. More in terms of electricity, space, faultying/failing components etc...
IMO and others will agree its only cheap in the short term.
Iam not being critical of what virginia did but they have to understand that theres so much more to a supercomputer than pure theoretical flops.
IMO and others will agree its only cheap in the short term.
Iam not being critical of what virginia did but they have to understand that theres so much more to a supercomputer than pure theoretical flops.
Where does Cray have a machine that can generate 10 TFlops? Also, VA Tech said a single DP G5 node has as much compute power as a single Cray node.
power yes, memory bandwidth, low latency, io bandwidth iam afraid not. And the memory handling is 100X better on the CRAY.
Iam attacking the cost factor here, it costs more to run a clustor than a supercomputer in the longterm.
Iam attacking the cost factor here, it costs more to run a clustor than a supercomputer in the longterm.
more ebay nonsense
you know, basically this is like a limited edition set of machines.
i think they should take a small risk: hire a few engravers to engrave some commemorative slogan on the side of the machine under the apple logo (like "this machine was part of big mac")
then sell them on ebay. i'd not be surprised if many of them sold above value, just becaause mac fans (i.e. us), are such religious maniacs! 😀
hell, they will get all the free publicity they need from the mac press (macrumors, maccentral, etc. and so on).
at the very least, it'd be an interesting experiment.
you know, basically this is like a limited edition set of machines.
i think they should take a small risk: hire a few engravers to engrave some commemorative slogan on the side of the machine under the apple logo (like "this machine was part of big mac")
then sell them on ebay. i'd not be surprised if many of them sold above value, just becaause mac fans (i.e. us), are such religious maniacs! 😀
hell, they will get all the free publicity they need from the mac press (macrumors, maccentral, etc. and so on).
at the very least, it'd be an interesting experiment.
I just had to throw my own insight into this.
Power:
The PowerPC 970FX in the G5 Xserve uses 24.5W per processor compared to 51W for the original 970 used in the PowerMac G5. So we have a 26.5W saving per processor or 53W savings per machine. This is just for the processor so we can probably assume there is more of a power savings due to the lack of an optical drive and the lack of a beefy ATI Radeon card. So assuming they will still have 1100 machines that's a minimum savings of 58,300W or 58 kW. The cheapest power available in Virginia is from Dominion Virginia Power (http://www.state.va.us/scc/news/p2comp.htm) and for a large commercial customer it is 3.624 cents per kwh (kilowatt hour or 1 hour of 1000-watts). This comes out to $2.11 per hour saved. Assuming it runs 24/7 365 days a year (it won't exactly, but this is just an estimate) they will save $18,508 per year or the cost of 5 Xserve cluster nodes with 2-gigs of RAM (standard educational pricing and it's been said that VT got a deal on the RAM which added almost $1,000 per machine in my equation).
Cost:
A PowerMac G5 similar to what Virginia Tech bought is $3,644 while a cluster node G5 Xserve would be $3,444. Virginia Tech could care less if those PowerMacs had a SuperDrive, 56k modem, optical audio, and a Radeon. They can turn these G5 workstations around and sell them for a fairly high price. I'd bet that most likely Apple is trading the machines and doing the refurbishing themselves since they can easily move 1100 refurbished machines via the Apple Store online.
Maybe we want a faster cluster
It's been said that the original layout design allowed for the racks to be reconfigured assuming that Apple was going to release a 2U Xserve G5. All wiring is setup for this. I haven't heard that anywhere reliable, but it has been said. Assuming that VT can install the Xserves and have quite a bit of room left over. Perhaps with this room they can add addition machines. It wouldn't make sense to aim for the number 1 machine spot, but number 2 is quite possible. VT is currently pushing 17600 gigaflops or 16 gigaflops per machine. The number 2 spot is at 20480 gigaflops. 180 additional machines at VT would provide the additional speed necessary to match the number 2 (theoretically which doesn't really equal true speed as they don't scale perfectly).
Just a few thoughts.
Power:
The PowerPC 970FX in the G5 Xserve uses 24.5W per processor compared to 51W for the original 970 used in the PowerMac G5. So we have a 26.5W saving per processor or 53W savings per machine. This is just for the processor so we can probably assume there is more of a power savings due to the lack of an optical drive and the lack of a beefy ATI Radeon card. So assuming they will still have 1100 machines that's a minimum savings of 58,300W or 58 kW. The cheapest power available in Virginia is from Dominion Virginia Power (http://www.state.va.us/scc/news/p2comp.htm) and for a large commercial customer it is 3.624 cents per kwh (kilowatt hour or 1 hour of 1000-watts). This comes out to $2.11 per hour saved. Assuming it runs 24/7 365 days a year (it won't exactly, but this is just an estimate) they will save $18,508 per year or the cost of 5 Xserve cluster nodes with 2-gigs of RAM (standard educational pricing and it's been said that VT got a deal on the RAM which added almost $1,000 per machine in my equation).
Cost:
A PowerMac G5 similar to what Virginia Tech bought is $3,644 while a cluster node G5 Xserve would be $3,444. Virginia Tech could care less if those PowerMacs had a SuperDrive, 56k modem, optical audio, and a Radeon. They can turn these G5 workstations around and sell them for a fairly high price. I'd bet that most likely Apple is trading the machines and doing the refurbishing themselves since they can easily move 1100 refurbished machines via the Apple Store online.
Maybe we want a faster cluster
It's been said that the original layout design allowed for the racks to be reconfigured assuming that Apple was going to release a 2U Xserve G5. All wiring is setup for this. I haven't heard that anywhere reliable, but it has been said. Assuming that VT can install the Xserves and have quite a bit of room left over. Perhaps with this room they can add addition machines. It wouldn't make sense to aim for the number 1 machine spot, but number 2 is quite possible. VT is currently pushing 17600 gigaflops or 16 gigaflops per machine. The number 2 spot is at 20480 gigaflops. 180 additional machines at VT would provide the additional speed necessary to match the number 2 (theoretically which doesn't really equal true speed as they don't scale perfectly).
Just a few thoughts.
20th Anniversary VT Commemorative G5
I'm voting for an engraved box that the fanatics will scoop up from Apple. Part of the 20th Anniversary Apple Celebration. Perhaps Giveaway? Steve has lots of tricks up his sleeve. Seems like the year of the apple promotions.
I'm voting for an engraved box that the fanatics will scoop up from Apple. Part of the 20th Anniversary Apple Celebration. Perhaps Giveaway? Steve has lots of tricks up his sleeve. Seems like the year of the apple promotions.
Mr. Anderson
Moderator emeritus
Re: 20th Anniversary VT Commemorative G5
Ha, maybe with Pepsi!
Win part of the fastest Mac in the world - 1100 winners 😀
That would be damn funny - and a good promotion - but I don't see Apple or VTech giving them away.
D
Ha, maybe with Pepsi!
Win part of the fastest Mac in the world - 1100 winners 😀
That would be damn funny - and a good promotion - but I don't see Apple or VTech giving them away.
D
This is akin to the "Photoshop benchmark". So ridiculously narrow that it has no connection to reality for most purposes. Several months ago I saw a benchmark one of the supercomputing lists between a Cray X1 compute node and a bunch of other high end commodity processors that someone did to make the point of why people still buy genuine supercomputers. For tight FP code (think LINPACK), the Cray wasn't all that spectacular (though still quite good considering it was running at 800MHz).
But when they ran large-scale scientific supercomputing codes that don't run tight FP loops that fit in cache (i.e. they exercised the memory), the single Cray compute node slaughtered the high-end commodity processors. We are talking a 10x difference in real performance. The reason? Real supercomputers like Cray have memory performance that we can only dream of even on the fastest commodity processors like the Opteron or PPC970. For supercomputing applications that can use it (and the majority actually do), there is a market for Crays because they can do things quickly that would be very slow on a G5 cluster.
ObTrivia: The memory and I/O architecture on the Opteron is not AMD original. AMD bought the design for the next-generation Cray system and then cut it down a little bit to make it practical for small commodity systems. It is one of the reasons the memory is so bloody fast on the Opteron -- it is a subsystem originally designed for Cray.
shamino
macrumors 68040
Short lifespan?
But this supercomputer is a cluster of off-the-shelf Macs. This means the 1100 units can be sold off individually, and it is much easier to find 1100 buyers that each want a signle G5 tower than it would be to find a single buyer to take the whole cluster.
If it was a dedicated supercomputer (like a Cray, for instance), you'd be right. Such a device wouldn't have much resale value, except to other research groups with a huge budget.
But this supercomputer is a cluster of off-the-shelf Macs. This means the 1100 units can be sold off individually, and it is much easier to find 1100 buyers that each want a signle G5 tower than it would be to find a single buyer to take the whole cluster.
True supercomputers are superior to clusters in some aspects.
Clusters are superior to true supercomputers in some aspects.
Making comments about the suitability of one or the other when you don't know a company/institution's use of it is just plain silly.
Back when I was in high school, we had a nice ETA. A building leak fried the fiber optic interconnects. For significantly less than the price of repairing it, we built a cluster that performed better for the tasks that we used it for.
God forbid people ever think that people who spend millions of dollars may have considered their options beforehand.
Clusters are superior to true supercomputers in some aspects.
Making comments about the suitability of one or the other when you don't know a company/institution's use of it is just plain silly.
Back when I was in high school, we had a nice ETA. A building leak fried the fiber optic interconnects. For significantly less than the price of repairing it, we built a cluster that performed better for the tasks that we used it for.
God forbid people ever think that people who spend millions of dollars may have considered their options beforehand.