CNet Commentary Tries To Blow Off Virginia Tech's G5 Supercomputer

by , 11:00 AM EST, March 31st, 2004

Some unnamed person at CNet is tense about Apple getting attention for the Virginia Tech Big Mac project. If you remember, the VT project used 1,100 Power Mac G5s to make the world's third fastest supercomputing cluster. Better yet, the university did it for a mere US$5.2 million, a tiny fraction of the cost of any of the other top 10 ranked supercomputers.

Understandably, this made lots of news last year when the story broke, and it gave Apple new cachet in a market where the company had never before been a player. Not so fast, says CNet News' unsigned commentary. That figure doesn't count the free student labor, and besides, it's really no big deal anyway. Corporate customers are all about the Big Boys in this market, so this Apple thing is just not important. From the commentary:

In an academic environment, there are plenty of graduate students on hand to figure out the best arrangement of processors, memory and network gear for a given task. Students also can translate software written for other computers to Apple's systems, which with a single machine now on the top 500 list are far from prevalent in the supercomputing arena.

So the Apple project at Virginia Tech may be a wonderful educational project, but commercial customers who have less interest in experimentation are more likely to pay specialists at Linux Networx, RLX Technologies, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell or Hewlett-Packard to plan the plumbing, package the software and plug in the cables. And those companies aren't going to rely on Macs.

You can find the full commentary at CNet News' Web site.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Of all the stupid things to say. Of all the insipid and childish things to try and say. This article certainly ranks in the top 10 of FUD arguments, at least when measured by lack of credibility. The Virginia Tech project was an amazing accomplishment, and the Big Boys in this market should be tense.

That is, they should be tense if Apple actually manages to capitalize on the project, which remains to be seen, but let's look at the one reason the author of this bit of commentary says that the Big Mac project is no big deal, the free student labor.

Let's say that Virginia Tech had 999 hours of free student labor. This is taking the "hundreds of volunteered hours of Virginia Tech faculty, staff and students to help set up the 19.25 tons of computers, routers and other equipment" to its maximum.

Now, let's say that VT had instead been forced to pay professionals for that man power. Let's say that the best price they could get was US$300 per hour, another extreme figure. Do the math, and that comes out to US$299,700. Add that to the US$5.2 million in costs, and you still have less than US$5.5 million to build the world's third fastest super computing cluster. Double it, just in case those whacky academics were deliberately down playing the amount of free labor. Heck, let's triple it, because you also have to count all those free student man hours spent in porting software, and you still have costs of less than US$6.1 million.

Indeed, throw in another couple of million in other unclaimed costs, just for the sake of argument, and you still have costs well below US$10 million. That is nothing short of an amazing accomplishment in the world of supercomputing, and no amount of FUD can change that.

Yes, the traditional players aren't going to be using Macs in their pitches to corporate America, but then, many of the supercomputers in the world are actually in academic environments. Also, we very much hope that Apple or a third party makes a new business out of this, which again remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that things change, companies change, and perceptions change, and our opinion is that VT's G5 project has been responsible for a lot of changed perceptions for Apple and the Mac platform.

CNet News Commentary