'Expect to see a lot more G5 clusters'

'The world's largest switcher' Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan (Direktor der Terascale Computing Facility an der Virginia Tech University) erzählte auf der O'Reilly Mac OS X Konferenz von seiner Power Mac G5 Bestellung:
"On June 23 Apple announced the G5. Varadarajan said that contrary to rumors, it was the first that they had heard about it as well. On June 26 they told Apple they were interested in placing a "fairly large order". A day later he flew to California and met with Apple. One of their first questions was how long he'd been a Mac owner. Varadarajan said he never had one. Twenty-four hours later Apple committed. Starting on September 5, the G5's arrived in Virginia. An audience member asked if he'd made the purchase through the Apple store. Varadarajan smiled and said that actually, yes, he had."
Varadarajan reported that "our latest numbers are 9.555 tera and we still have more tricks left. We are hoping for another 10 percent boost to become the first academic machine to cross 10 tera. The last ratings put us at number three worldwide."
Im Moment läuft der Cluster übrigens noch unter X.2.7, soll aber in den nächsten Wochen 'pantherized' werden.

Auch in der eWeek berichtet man über das verstärkte Interesse an Apple aus dem Bildungsbereich:
"There is a lot of interest in Macs because everyone sitting in this domain of scientific computing realizes that here you have a processor that can really do numericals," he said. "It can do numericals better than anybody out there, and that's what they care about."

Mehr über die Konferenz auch bei Wired:
"O'Reilly suggested that networking technologies like Rendezvous or iChat buddy lists should be built into all of Apple's software. If instant messaging were added to the Address Book function included with OS X, the result would be something like Friendster, the wildly popular dating/socializing network, O'Reilly said.
"The reason I'm excited about Apple is I think they are a real leader in this area, but they are not thinking hard enough how to complete the picture," he chided.