INDUSTRY

John Markoff from The New York Times reports that the G5 Supercomputer at Virginia Tech may be the fourth fastest computer in the US: "The Virginia Tech supercomputer, put together from 1,100 Macs, has been successfully tested in recent days...The official results for the ranking will not be reported until next month at SC2003. The Apple-based supercomputer, which is powered by 2,200 I.B.M. microprocessors, was able to compute at 7.41 trillion operations a second, a speed surpassed by only three other ultra-fast computers." The home-brew supercomputer was assembled in just one month at a cost of slightly more than $5 million. "We are demonstrating that you can build a very high performance machine for a fifth to a tenth of the cost of what supercomputers now cost," said Hassan Aref, the dean of the School of Engineering at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. Starting when they returned to school in September, student volunteers, who received free pizzas for their labor, helped with the assembly of the system, essentially an array of large refrigerators to keep the computers from overheating. Virginia Tech's president offered free football tickets to the technicians who were spending long hours on the project. "When you have a small budget," said Srinidhi Varadarajan, a leader of the project, "you have to take risks." "On the surface this is a pretty impressive machine," Mr. Dongarra said. "It shows that the processors are getting to the point where this kind of performance will be quite common."