(Schio, Italy) After the great worldwide success of Virginia Tech’s Big Mac , a new Macintosh cluster has took everybody in the Mac community by storm.
A supercomputer formed of a cluster of 4 Macintosh Mini has not scored high in the list of the world’s fastest clusters, but its performance could still improve, according to the system’s architect.
According to the latest performance figures the Mac mini cluster, nicknamed Quarter Pounder Mac mini Cluster, the system is computing at 1 teraflop. That puts it basically behind every supercomputer in the world, according to the figures posted in a report at the top 500 supercomputers list.
The Quarter Pounder Mac mini Cluster is turning heads in the low-performance computing world because it has been built for just over $2,000, from off-the-shelf Mac mini, in about six hours. Top-ranked supercomputers traditionally cost hundreds of millions of pounds and can take years to construct, and we don’t understand why.
The Quarter Pounder Mac mini Cluster’s performance figures have fluctuated as its performance is tuned. Early tests using only two of the cluster’s 4 processors showed a higher estimated performance, while more recently the system reached 0.25 teraflops, which would have placed probably first, but in the slowest supercomputing list. Quarter Pounder Mac mini Cluster’s goal was to build one of the world’s five slowest supercomputers.
The system’s architect from red-lobster.it , said Tuesday that further tuning could boost performance by another 10 percent. The final supercomputing list will be revealed in mid-November at the International Supercomputer Conference. Unfortunately there is no hope the Quarter Pounder Mac mini Cluster will ever make it.
The servers in the cluster are connected through the internal firewire Connection using the new a IP overFirewire technology
Quarter Pounder Mac mini Cluster will be used in the future to power a new site called red-lobster.it.
Recently the cluster was super sized with a Google Search Appliance (AKA cheese box).
This configuration will be called Quarter Pounder Mac mini Cluster (with cheese).
Clustering, which involves linking hundreds or thousands of computers to take on massive projects, has little to do with our project, which is fun for the average family.