System G was a cluster supercomputer at

Virginia Tech The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, commonly referred to as Virginia Tech (VT), is a Public university, public Land-grant college, land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States ...

consisting of 324

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

Mac Pro Mac Pro is a series of workstations and servers for professionals made by Apple Inc. since 2006. The Mac Pro, by some performance benchmarks, is the most powerful computer that Apple offers. It is one of four desktop computers in the current ...

computers with a total of 2592 processing cores. It was finished in November 2008 and ranked 279 in that month's edition of

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

, running at 16.78

teraflops Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...

and peaking at 22.94 teraflops. It ran at a "sustained (Linpack) performance of 22.8 TFlops". It transmitted data between nodes over

Gigabit Ethernet In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use in ...

and 40 Gbit/s

Infiniband InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used ...

Mac Pro Nodes

Each of the 324 Mac Pro machines contained two quad-core 2.8 GHz Xeon processors and 8

gigabyte The gigabyte () is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The SI prefix, prefix ''giga-, giga'' means 109 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte i ...

s of

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Namesake

System G's name stemmed from its homage to System X and to its focus on

green computing Green computing, green IT (Information Technology), or Information and Communication Technology Sustainability, is the study and practice of environmentally sustainable computing or IT. The goals of green computing include optimising energy ef ...

—the cluster has thousands of power and thermal sensors to test high performance computing at low power requirements and was, at the time, the largest power-aware research system in the world.

References

External links

* Computer Science at Virginia Tech
System G
* Virginia Tech
Center for High-End Computing Systems (''‘CHECS’'')
* Ars Technica
Virginia Tech building super computer out of 324 Mac Pros

TOP500 website
X86 supercomputers Virginia Tech {{Super-compu-stub