System X (pronounced ''"System Ten"'') was a

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

assembled by

Virginia Tech Virginia Tech (formally the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and informally VT, or VPI) is a Public university, public Land-grant college, land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. It also ...

's Advanced Research Computing facility in the summer of 2003. Costing US$5.2 million, it was originally composed of 1,100

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

Power Mac G5 The Power Mac G5 is a series of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from 2003 to 2006 as part of the Power Mac series. When introduced, it was the most powerful computer in Apple's Macintosh lineup, and ...

computers with dual 2.0 GHz processors. System X was decommissioned on May 21, 2012. System X ran at 12.25 Teraflops, (20.24 peak), and was ranked #3 on November 16, 2003 and #280 in the July 2008 edition of the

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 ...

list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. The system used error-correcting ( ECC) RAM, which is important for accuracy due to the rate of bits flipped by

cosmic ray Cosmic rays are high-energy particles or clusters of particles (primarily represented by protons or atomic nuclei) that move through space at nearly the speed of light. They originate from the Sun, from outside of the Solar System in our own ...

s or other interference sources in its vast number of RAM chips.

Background

The supercomputer's name originates from the use of the

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

for each node, and because it was the first university computer to achieve 10

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

on the high performance

LINPACK benchmark The LINPACK Benchmarks are a measure of a system's Floating-point arithmetic, floating-point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense ''n'' by ''n'' system of linear equations ''Ax'' =&nbs ...

. The supercomputer is also known as Big Mac or Terascale Cluster. In 2003 it was also touted as "the world's most powerful and cheapest homebuilt supercomputer." System X was constructed with a relatively low budget of just $5.2 million, in the span of only three months, thanks in large part to using off-the-shelf Power Mac G5 computers. By comparison, the

Earth Simulator The is a series of supercomputers deployed at Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology Yokohama Institute of Earth Sciences. Earth Simulator (first generation) The first generation of Earth Simulator, developed by the Japanese go ...

, the fastest supercomputer at the time, cost approximately $400 million to build.

Upgrade to Server-Grade Parts

In 2004, Virginia Tech upgraded its computer to Apple's newly released,

Xserve Xserve is a line of rack unit computers designed by Apple Inc. for use as servers. Introduced in 2002, it was Apple's first designated server hardware design since the Apple Network Server in 1996. In the meantime, ordinary Power Macintosh G3 a ...

G5 servers. The upgraded version ranked #7 in the 2004

list and its server-grade error-correcting memory solved the problem of cosmic ray interference. In October 2004, Virginia Tech partially rebuilt System X at a cost of about $600,000. These improvements brought the computer's speed up to 12.25 Teraflops, which placed System X #14 on the 2005

list.

Similar Projects

Virginia Tech's system was the model for Xseed, a smaller system also made from Xserve servers and built by

Bowie State University Bowie State University (Bowie State) is a public historically black university in Prince George's County, Maryland, north of Bowie. It is part of the University System of Maryland. Founded in 1865, Bowie State is Maryland's oldest historically b ...

Maryland Maryland ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It shares borders with Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware and the Atlantic Ocean to ...

. Xseed was ranked #166 in the 2005

. System G has 324 Mac Pros (2592 processor cores) with QDR

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 ...

in Virginia Tech's Center for High-End Computing Systems.

References

External links

Virginia Tech - System X
(via

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

)
CHECS Computing Resources: Experimental Facilities - System G, Production Computing Facilities - System X
(via

)
Virginia Tech - Advanced Research Computing

TOP500 website

Film about System X, YouTube
{{DEFAULTSORT:System X (Computing) One-of-a-kind computers Supercomputers Virginia Tech

Background

Upgrade to Server-Grade Parts

Similar Projects

See also

References

External links