New Weapon for US Army: Apple Super Computer!

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June 21, 2004 - 19:47 EDT_ COLSA, a US Army contractor based in Huntsville, Alabama, today announced the purchase of 1,566 Xserve G5s to build a new supercomputer expected to be one of the fastest in the world. The supercomputer, named "MACH 5," is expected to deliver a peak performance capability of more than 25 TFlops/second at a cost of US$5.8 million and will be used to model the complex aero-thermodynamics of hypersonic flight for the US Army.

"We expect MACH 5 to rank as one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet," said Dr Anthony DiRienzo, executive vice president at COLSA Corporation. "According to the November 2003 Top 500 supercomputer list, it would rank second only to Japan's $350 million Earth Simulator computer at less than two percent of the cost. We evaluated PC-based proposals from other vendors but none came close to delivering either the price, performance or manageability of the Apple Xserve G5."

"Apple is honored that COLSA chose the Xserve G5 to build their supercomputer cluster," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "The ground breaking 64-bit performance and incredible I/O capabilities of the Xserve G5, combined with the reliability and scalability of our UNIX-based Mac OS X Server software deliver high performance computing solutions perfect for anyone looking to cluster from two to thousands of nodes, at an unbeatable price."

Mach 5 is expected to be up and running for the Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center (AMRDEC) division of the US Army Research and Development Command by late Fall.

June 22, 2004 - 13:14 EDT__ by Larry Angell - As reported yesterday, Colsa Corp. said that it will purchase 1,566 Apple Xserve G5s to build a new supercomputer for the US Army. The system, named "MACH 5," will cost US$5.8 million and is expected to be one of the fastest in the world. Dr. Anthony DiRienzo, executive vice president at Colsa, told MacMinute that the Xserve G5 was chosen based on four criteria: performance, cost, facility requirements (space, power, etc.) and vendor assessment (reliability and stability). "The Xserve G5, with two processors, and the ability to perform 4 floating point operations per processor, and the 2GHz speed gave a high performance ranking," DiRienzo said. "It took 1,566 nodes to meet the performance criteria of greater than 25 TFlops, which led to a reduced cost in comparison to other bids. Also, the G5 uses significantly less power than other candidates, resulting in lower operations cost."

 

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