Holy covert upgrade, Batman! How clever of those oh-so-fashionable übernerds at Virginia Tech to hide their supercomputer's top secret system-wide performance overhaul in the last place anyone would ever look-- namely, inside the supercomputer's not-so-secret system-wide architecture overhaul. You probably recall the school's announcement that, merely three months after having built the world's third-fastest supercomputer out of 1,100 off-the-shelf dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac G5s, it was dismantling the cluster in order to slim it down by switching it over to 1,100 Xserves. (G5-based Xserves weren't available when the cluster was first built, don'tcha know.) At the time, we remember thinking what a shame it was that the system would suffer all that downtime only to return with 2,200 2.0 GHz G5 processors, just like it had in the first place. Sure, it'd be svelter, and maybe it could finally fit into a size 3 evening gown, but shedding all that girth wouldn't make it any faster.

How wrong we were-- but only because Virginia Tech kindasorta neglected to mention what AppleInsider is now claiming, as pointed out by faithful viewer Frozen Tundra: that those are no ordinary Xserves. Normal, mere mortal Xserve G5s, as you know, still top out at dual 2.0 GHz, and have ever since their debut; since Virginia Tech's original clustered Power Macs were all stock configurations, it was only natural for everyone to assume that the Xserves shipped to the project were standard issue as well. As it turns out, though, Virginia Tech got the batch of 1,100 Xserves that came from Krypton and gained super speed when exposed to the radiation of Earth's unfamiliar yellow sun. Or maybe they... uh... went through whatever deliriously improbable life-changing experience that transformed mild-mannered Barry Allen into the Flash. (We seem to recall something about him getting bitten by a radioactive road runner or something, but we're not positive.)

See, apparently Virginia Tech's 1,100 newly-Infinibanded Xserves are all dual 2.3 GHz models-- and if that strikes you as odd, good, because as far as Apple's price list is concerned, there's no such thing as a dual 2.3 GHz Xserve; the units delivered for inclusion in the Virginia Tech cluster "are reportedly unique to System X and are not available for purchase by the general public." Which hardly strikes us as fair; after all, what if we wanted to drop six or eight million clams and build a terascale cluster? Why should ours have 13% less raw processing power than Virginia Tech's? We suspect graft. It's like the school slipped Apple a twenty for a better table away from the restrooms. Or maybe Srinidhi Varadarajan's celebrity status scored them the speed boost. Mankind may never know.

Anyway, the cat's out of the bag as far as the 2.3 GHz thing is concerned, so when Virginia Tech finally posts new performance scores, you can expect to see up to a 15% increase over last year's third-place numbers. That's an extra teraflop and a half, give or take (probably take), which is nothing to sneeze at, but regardless, third place is but a memory. Even at 11.8ish teraflops, System X would barely be squeaking into fourth place on the current list, and we'll be lucky if it clings to the top five when the next list is compiled.

But hey, it's still one crazy-impressive accomplishment, and who knows what superpowers those Xserves might possess in addition to excessive speed? We've got our fingers crossed for x-ray vision, or maybe super-stretchiness, or even owning an invisible jet. Basically, anything but the ability to talk to fish.