Pooch developer Dauger Research Inc. noted that a parallel-processing cluster of 33 Apple Xserves has been used to achieve over 217 billion floating point operations per second (GigaFlops). The cluster is used by the Applied Cluster Computing Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dauger said it’s the largest working Xserve cluster known to exist.
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The 1/5 TeraFlop performance benchmark was performed on the AltiVec Fractal Carbon demo. Dauger said it’s the largest calculation yet made by an Xserve cluster.
The cluster itself comprised 33 dual processor Xserves operating at 1GHz, along with a 100baseT switch made by 3COM. The 1/5 TeraFlop performance benchmark was performed using AltiVec Fractal Carbon demo, which used MacMPI_X.c for message passing. The Xserves themselves were running Mac OS X Server v10.2, and were able to perform the parallel computation using Dauger Research’s Pooch software.