Co-location and dedicated server provider OSI Hosting announced on Wednesday that it has acquired 1,000 Xserves from Apple as part of its expansion into seven new facilities. Part of the open source industry, OSI selected Apple because it supports open source and Mac OS X Server is a FreeBSD-based operating system. The company offers dedicated, virtual and co-location servers along with managed services and equipment financing and leasing.
The OSI sale comes on the heels of another recent Apple win: a 1,566-node G5 Xserve supercluster built by U.S. Army contractor COLSA Corp., a set-up detailed in an article on Apple’s Web site. The supercluster, which can exceed 25 trillion teraflops — 25 trillion floating-point operations — per second at peak performance, was built for COLSA’s use in modeling the aero-thermodynamics of hypersonic flight. The article notes: “A single person using a hand-held calculator — without pausing to eat or sleep — would need more than two million years to calculate what the Apple supercluster can calculate in a single second.”