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<p>The brand new "Big Mac" supercomputer at Virginia Tech could be the second most powerful supercomputer on the planet, according to preliminary numbers.</p> <p>Early benchmarks of Virginia Tech's brand new supercomputer -- which is strung together from 1,100 dual-processor Power Mac G5s -- may vault the machine into second place in the rankings of the worlds' fastest supercomputers, second only to Japan's monstrously big and expensive Earth Simulator.</p>

New Supercomputer Due At The U1,000-Computer 'Metacluster' To Tackle Tough Biomedical Problems Media Contacts   August 13, 2003 -- Construction of a $2 million supercomputer comprised of 1,000 smaller computers will begin in September at the University of Utah, where researchers will use the powerful machine to tackle complex problems in biomedical research. “This will be by far the largest computer in the state of Utah for scientific research,” says physicist Julio Facelli, director of the university’s Center for High Performance Computing. When the so-called “metacluster” supercomputer is assembled by the end of 2003 and tests are performed that...

IBM Flips the Switch on Deep Computing on Demand; GX Technology Plans to Transform Business with Supercomputing On Demand 26 Jun 2003, 09:43am ET - - - - - ARMONK, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 26, 2003--IBM today ushered in the era of deep computing on demand with the start up of its first facility designed to deliver supercomputing power to customers over the Internet, helping to free them from the fixed costs and management responsibility of owning a supercomputer. Additional facilities are planned nationally and internationally. IBM's deep computing on demand will offer scalable, highly secure systems that customers can access...

Hollywood adopting Linux Rendering, cheap and fast By Egan Orion: Wednesday 24 July 2002, 06:09 BIG MEDIA COMPANIES have a well-deserved reputation for being deeply clueless about information technology. Studio executives view it as a necessary evil, albeit useful for padding byzantine accounting in order to pay their actors and investors as little as possible. But the smaller studios producing the computer animation wizardry driving many popular movies are more sophisticated. They are moving to Linux on x86 platforms, and are realizing both lower costs and higher performance. Thus Cnet is reporting that Industrial Light and Magic(ILM), the operation responsible...