WHEN computer scientists at Virginia Tech’s Terascale Computing Facility needed a new supercomputer this year, they quickly realised they would have to cut a few corners. “We talked to all the usual suspects,” says associate director Kevin Shinpaugh. “But it was all out of our price range.”
So they turned their attention to a less obvious piece of hardware: Apple’s Power Mac G5 desktop computer. If they could lash hundreds of these machines together, they reasoned, they might be able to build a formidable number cruncher at an affordable price.
That hunch came good last month, when the latest supercomputer…
