Say, remember just six months ago when Apple (the computer company, not Baby Paltrow, who was merely a human bean at the time) made waves in the hardcore geek community because Virginia Tech managed to build the world's third-fastest supercomputer out of off-the-shelf Power Mac G5s in a matter of months for a cost normally associated less with massive parallel computational clusters and more with, for example, a large fries and a Coke? Well, faithful viewer mrmgraphics notes that Apple is still milking that massive PR win for every drop of happy juice it can; the company has just launched a whole new section of its web site devoted to High Performance Computing, and a link to more about Virginia Tech's "System X" features prominently on the main page: "Not only is Mac OS X [sic] the world's fastest, most powerful 'home-built' supercomputer, it quite possibly has the lowest price/performance of any supercomputer on the TOP500 list."

There's just one leetle problem, here: due to a recent reduction in computational performance, System X might not actually be on the TOP500 list for much longer. In fact, the AtAT staff happens to own a Mac-based system that currently outperforms System X's latest output: it's called a Macintosh SE, and its single 8 MHz 68000 chip is running rings around System X right this second-- because System X isn't processing squat. And according to a Think Secret article pointed out to us by faithful viewer frozen tundra, since the cluster isn't so much as spitting a flying toaster onto the screen, it'll actually "temporarily drop off the Linpack Top 500 Supercomputer list" when the new stats are published next month.

Why this embarrassing development? Well, remember when Virginia Tech announced that it would be replacing all 1,100 Power Macs in System X with 1,100 Xserve G5s? It sounded like a great idea at the time, since keeping 1,100 Power Macs in racks is sort of like storing peanut butter in Ziploc sandwich bags; you can do it, but there's obviously a better way. Xserves would provide roughly the same computational power while cutting the system's physical size "by a factor of three" and chewing up far less power for cooling, and of course the only reason Virginia Tech didn't build the cluster that way in the first place was because Xserve G5s didn't exist last summer.

So Virginia Tech planned its little plans and expected that the switchover would be "complete by May," but May is more than half over and the lights are still out down System X way. Apparently the school hadn't counted on IBM's G5 yield problems and Apple's ensuing Xserve shipping delays, because the school has already sold off its Power Macs in anticipation of the new Xserves arriving, and now the cluster isn't so much a cluster as it is a "massive datacenter of customized racks" currently hosting nothing more than a few tumbleweeds and the sound of crickets. Reports apparently conflict slightly on the Xserve shipping status; Think Secret reports that one source says Xserves won't start arriving until next month, while another says a few have finally started to trickle in. In any case, though, it sounds like System X will still be offline by the time the new TOP500 list is published, which will apparently return to its former Macless state for half a year. Bummer.

On the plus side, though, Think Secret's sources indicate that "when the Xserve upgrade is complete, the cluster may have even more nodes," so when it pops back onto the list come November, maybe it'll have pumped its score a bit higher past the 10-teraflop mark. Of course, supercomputers are being built and expanded all the time, so there's no telling what slot System X will win in six months' time. We're keeping our fingers crossed for a top-5 placement, just so it gets to win back its cool little blurb on the TOP500 home page. It's all about the home page...