(That's not really my real name... but does it really
matter? I mean, really?)
I DO HOPE FOLKS HAVE BEEN PAYING ATTENTION TO
what's been happening at UCLA's Appleseedweb
site (see http://exodus.physics.ucla.edu/appleseed/appleseed.html
as well as related
URLs like http://www.mactimes.com/bin/news/index.pl?read=382,
among
others).
No: correction. I hope folks at Apple have
been paying attention.
For those who haven't been paying attention, let
me summarise in just one sentence. At
UCLA they've purchased a few G3 Macs, hooked them up together
with 100Base-T
Ethernet, added some special software of their own, and
hey presto, they have what they
like to call "A Parallel Macintosh Cluster for Numerically
Intensive Computing -- A Plug
and Play Parallel Computer".
Fab, eh?
The G3s work hard in the daytime as individual Macs, and
at night, when the users have
gone home, the entire cluster crunches numbers by the googolplex
in massively parallel
mode.
And as they say at Appleseed, "Unlike
Unix-based clusters, no special expertise in
operating systems is required to build and run the cluster".
This is the real world, guys and gals, not some
theoretical Christmas
wish list! The darn thing does work, and it works
now.
Not only does it work, processor for processor it works
almost as well as a top-of-the-line
Cray T3E-900. Check out the charts on the Appleseed
web site. (And just in case you
didn't know, "The CRAY T3E-900 system has the world's
highest computer performance
available, and is the first and only commercially available
teraflops system on the market"
-- according to the page describing this mammoth at Cray's
Web site, accessible at http://www.cray.com/news/9611/crayt3e900.html).
Of course a Cray T3E-900 can have thousands of processors,
while Appleseeds are still
small. But they're scalable -- check out the AppleseedFAQ
sheet. So if you keep adding PowerPC chips to a G3 cluster, and hook them up with
real high bandwidth connections, soon you could be rivalling the very best there is!
And just in case you were wondering, yes, the tactic would
work with
iMacs too. (You school principals out there with the next
two dozen
iMacs on order, are you listening?)
Yep. This is the Big Apple. Growing from little Appleseed.
(Sorry. Bad pun. But then again,
I like puns).
But then again (again), why isn't Apple doing
anything about it? I understand all this is being done without any help
from Cupertino. Why?
And you know what? Cupertino could help a lot. Correction:
Cupertino should help a lot.
Wouldn't it be in their best interest to do so?
By doing so Apple could put itself in the big leagues --
and here big means BIG!
And once in the big leagues, no longer will the mainstream
press be able to thumb its nose
at Apple. Isn't Apple the company the media loves to hate?
So what could Apple do?
For starters, why does such a cluster need several G3 Macs?
All it really needs are several
G3 processors. Along, of course, with their backside
caches, the necessary RAM, and a
really big RAID.
But who needs all those multiple CD-ROM and floppy drives?
Not to mention the serial
ports. Or the modems.
And why limit connections to 100Base-T Ethernet, when there
are such things as Gigabit
Ethernet in use already, and Terabit Ethernet just round
the corner? Not to mention
FireWire, Apple's own baby. As the Appleseeds say
in their FAQ sheet, "After all, a faster
network is a lot of what you're paying for in a Cray."
Apple could trim all the flab, and create a lean
and mean
supercomputer to rival Cray's pride and joy.
And Apple could also come up with the software to run it.
Hey: don't they have the best and
brightest in Unix (formerly working for NeXT) on
their team now?
And all this for a fraction of the cost of a Cray!
It wouldn't take long, either. A few months, tops. By next
spring -- or next fall, latest -- if Apple
plays its cards right, you, too, could order a drag-and-drop
SuperMac from CompUSA. In
Rainbow Hue this time, not just in Bondi Blue.
And then you, too, could challenge IBM to a chess match.
(Heck, Garry Kasparov wouldn't
stand a chance).
....would Windows?
... (not his real name -- but you figured that out already,
right?) ... calls himself a "Thinker", especially about the
future. He thinks that's where he'll be spending the rest
of his life (but who's he kidding, eh? Doesn't he realize
it's always going to be now?)
Most people say to him "You can't be serious" -- and they're
right, he can't. (But then, who can be serious about
the future, seeing as how anything can happen in it, and usually
does ... er, will?)
His best book -- indeed his only book -- is entitled The
Seventh Generation, and its shareware version in Adobe
Acrobat format is available for download from his alter-ego's
web site (under construction right now) at http://cpu2308.adsl.bellglobal.com.
It's all about the next 150 years or so, and where technology
might take us in that amount of time. (Just $5.00 -- cheap!
And well worth it, though he says so himself). Check it out.
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