by Larry Angell – As reported yesterday, Colsa Corp. said that it will purchase 1,566 Apple Xserve G5s to build a new supercomputer for the US Army. The system, named “MACH 5,” will cost US$5.8 million and is expected to be one of the fastest in the world. Dr. Anthony DiRienzo, executive vice president at Colsa, told MacMinute that the Xserve G5 was chosen based on four criteria: performance, cost, facility requirements (space, power, etc.) and vendor assessment (reliability and stability). “The Xserve G5, with two processors, and the ability to perform 4 floating point operations per processor, and the 2GHz speed gave a high performance ranking,” DiRienzo said. “It took 1,566 nodes to meet the performance criteria of greater than 25 TFlops, which led to a reduced cost in comparison to other bids. Also, the G5 uses significantly less power than other candidates, resulting in lower operations cost.”