Okay, far be it from us to pass judgment on any of you, but, well, we're doing it anyway: some of you need serious help. A handful of faithful viewers (who shall remain nameless) have indicated that they're jonesing for dirt on the filthy secret lives of interconnected nodes in massively-parallel clustered computing environments. Not to blow our PG rating or anything, but apparently their misguided assumption is that when you cram several hundred wickedly fast systems together in a series of custom-designed racks and hook 'em up with a ton of internode bandwidth, it's a good bet that as soon as the cleaning staff leaves for the night the whole place turns into the computational/virtual equivalent of a scene from Caligula. That's as far as we're walking that scary path, other than to reiterate our recommendation for intense psychiatric care-- and to acknowledge that while the 1100 G5s destined for the Virginia Tech "Terascale Computing Facility" may not necessarily be promiscuous, they are undoubtedly cheap.

See, a wealth of details about that formerly hush-hush Virginia Tech G5 supercomputer have finally been made public; Think Secret was right last week when it claimed there was a campus informational meeting about the project slated for yesterday, and Mac Rumors points to detailed notes from the presentation available at Chaosmint. Sadly for some depraved viewers, there's precious little about the licentious activities those G5s get up to behind closed doors, but Virginia Tech has revealed that it went with Power Macs because they were the least expensive available option; they provide the most (pardon the expression) "bang for the buck."

Strange but true! Virginia Tech considered Sun's SPARC systems, but not for long; a SPARC-based cluster with enough oomph would have "required too many processors" and been "too expensive." How about IBM systems running AMD's Opteron, or HP units based on the Itanium? Nope; for the necessary performance, both options would have required double the number of processors and cost twice as much. Even Dell was rejected as "too expensive," which is a little alarming given how far they've been willing to slash their prices to win contracts in the past. And don't believe for a second that Dell didn't try; reportedly the reason this whole project was top secret in the first place was because "Dell was exploring pricing options during bidding" ever since February. In the end, evidently they just couldn't get prices down far enough to close the deal.

Once the dust had settled, only one vendor was still standing: Apple, whose Power Mac G5 represented the "lowest price" available from a pure "cost vs. performance" standpoint. Even if Virginia Tech paid full educational price for those 1,100 Power Macs (and you just know they didn't), the bill would "only" come to a bit under $3 million; the school is paying $5.2 million for the entire project. Did you ever think for even a split second that you'd live long enough to see Apple win a contract based on price? Because we sure didn't, and to us, that's more exciting than the thought of 1,100 aluminum G5 towers getting up to virtual shenanigans when no one's looking. Marginally.