Are you one of those Mac users who just can't ever seem to get enough speed? Oh, sure, you've got a dual-1.25 GHz Power Mac howling away on your desk like a banshee all sugared up on mochas, and yet somehow it still just isn't enough raw power to fill that gaping void inside. The beast within you demands real speed, the kind of pure, unadulterated velocity that rips the flesh from one's bones and turns it into conveniently preserved and inexpensive jerky. (Metaphorically speaking, of course.)

So what are you going to do about it? Well, you could sit on your kiester and wait until Apple and IBM produce a Mac with a PowerPC 970 or two under the hood, but waiting is the very antithesis of speed, and surely the creature writhing in your gut wouldn't stand for that. You could overclock your system, which is more in line with what a "Live Fast, Die Young, Leave A Voided Warranty" speed demon such as yourself might attempt, but then you risk system instability and even hardware damage, and nothing stops a speedster dead in his tracks like a reboot-- or worse, a repair job.

Your best option, then, might be to do what faithful viewer Pedro Henriquez tells us the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory did: buy thirty-three Xserves, string 'em together with network cable and special parallel processing software, and thusly create a tidy little single-rack cluster capable of cranking out a measured 217 gigaflops of wind-in-your-hair processing power. So what are you waiting for? You've got $132,000 sitting around just taking up valuable storage space, right? C'mon, what else are you going to buy with it-- a house? Priorities, buddy.

According to Dauger Research, who makes the clustering software running on the JPL's Stack O' Xserves, the AltiVec Fractal Carbon Demo has indeed reached greater performance peaks on a Mac-based cluster in the past: 233 gigaflops vs. 217. But whereas 33 Xserves fit into a single industry-standard rack with room for nine more, 152 desktop Power Macs take up rather more space than that. So we're guessing that if you really want to set a new Mac clustering performance record without needing to buy an extra acre of land to house the equipment, you're best off just maxing out a 42-unit rack, which would then have a theoretical peak of 630 gigaflops and would probably hit real-world performance of over 270 gigaflops for what would be a new Mac land speed record.

But even if you somehow manage to channel all that power into the Mac OS X Finder, trashing more than a hundred files at once will still bring up the spinning rainbow cursor. Some things just won't ever feel fast.