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G3 Supercomputer (8/25/98)
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You knew the G3 was fast, but how fast? Apparently fast enough to give a Cray supercomputer a run for its money, according to a MacCentral story. A group at UCLA has shown that, if used correctly, the raw processing power of the G3 yields a kick-ass number cruncher at a cost much lower that the millions typically associated with supercomputers.
The UCLA effort is called "Project Appleseed," and it reveals that not only does a single Power Mac G3/266 compare very favorably to a single computing node on a high-end "massively parallel processor" such as a Cray supercomputer, but also if you take four such G3's and network them together, you've got a parallel computing system that performs comparably to a Cray MPP at a fraction of the price-- only about $11,000. (It's worth noting that while four Power Macs perform similarly to a four-processor Cray Y-MP, that particular Cray is eight years old. But it's still an impressive feat.)
Of course, what we'd like to see is an array of five or six iMacs beat a Cray. Imagine the marketing potential of such a story. Let's see, you'd need six iMacs, an eight-port hub, and some extra RAM... you could probably squeeze out even better performance (due to more processors and fast ethernet), and keep the cost under ten grand. Who's up for the challenge? ;-)
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SceneLink (968)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 8/25/98 episode: August 25, 1998: The iMac easily clears the first two hurdles of the dreaded "Dad Test." Meanwhile, Steve Jobs himself claims that the iMac's internal modem is peachy keen, and blames all connection problems on the ISP's, while labrats at UCLA show that a few Power Mac G3's chained together possess the same processing power as the best Cray supercomputer of eight years ago...
Other scenes from that episode: 966: Passing the Dad Test (8/25/98) Okay, it's official; AtAT now both acknowledges and endorses the iMac as the new "computer for the rest of us." We were holding off on succumbing completely to the iMac's "I'm the simplest" claim that gets trumpeted so loudly in Apple's commercials until the ultimate test of ease and simplicity had been passed... 967: iModem? No Problem (8/25/98) It appears that the biggest iMac glitch so far has been the way that many owners have been unable to keep reliable connections with their Internet service providers when connecting via the iMac's internal 56K modem...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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