System G is a cluster supercomputer at

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 ...

consisting of 324

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

Mac Pro 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 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 updates always coinc ...

, running at 16.78

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 me ...

and peaking at 22.94 teraflops. It now runs at a "sustained (Linpack) performance of 22.8 TFlops". It transmits 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 i ...

and 40Gbit/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 us ...

Mac Pro Nodes

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

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

s of

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Namesake

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

green computing Green computing, green IT, or ICT sustainability, is the study and practice of environmentally sustainable computing or IT. The goals of green computing are similar to green chemistry: reduce the use of hazardous materials, maximize energy effi ...

—the cluster has thousands of power and thermal sensors to test high performance computing at low power requirements and is 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
{{DEFAULTSORT:Systemg X86 supercomputers Virginia Tech