Apple has posted a three-page profile on the 1,566-node Xserve G5 supercomputer cluster built by US Army contractor COLSA. (See MacMinute’s report from June.) “At its peak, the supercluster can exceed 25 teraflops — calculating more than 25 trillion floating-point operations per second. By comparison, the world’s fastest computer — NEC’s $350 million Earth Simulator — runs at a peak speed of 40 teraflops. 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.”
