33-XServe Cluster Achieves 217 GigaFlops

XServe Cluster achieves over 1/5 TeraFlop using 66 1-GHz G4's

Huntington Beach, California, USA - November 14, 2002 - Dauger Research, Inc., announces today that a milestone for cluster computing and the Macintosh platform has been accomplished. Software written by researchers at Dauger Research and the University of California, Los Angeles, achieved over 217 billion floating-point operations per second on a cluster of 33 XServes.

The Applied Cluster Computing Group (formerly known as the High-Performance Computing Group) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) recently acquired 33 XServes for the purpose of using them as a parallel computing cluster. Using Pooch, provided by Dauger Research, the JPL group has begun running parallel computing code on their new XServe cluster.

The XServe, widely publicized as Apple Computer's entry into server and large-scale scientific computing markets, has finally been used successfully for a large numerically-intensive calculation. Among the codes executed on the cluster, the AltiVec Fractal Carbon demo was one that achieved over 1/5 of a TeraFlop (1 TF = 1000 GF = one trillion floating-point operations per second). This result is the largest calculation yet performed on an XServe cluster.

The software used to obtain this impressive result is Pooch and MacMPI_X, the latest incarnation of AppleSeed, a project begun by physics researchers at UCLA in 1998. For four years and counting, their software is being used world-wide to transform Macintoshes into easy-to-use, numerically-intensive parallel computers. Complementing a benchmark performed using 76 Power Macintoshes at the University of Southern California (USC) in December 2001, this most recent calculation demonstrates the potential scalability and computational power of clusters based on the XServe.

The hardware included 33 Dual-Processor G4/1GHz XServes and one 48-port 100BaseT 3COM switch. The application code was the AltiVec Fractal Carbon demo, which used MacMPI_X.c for its message passing. The operating system was Mac OS X Server 10.2, and the parallel computing code was launched and managed using Pooch.

For full details, you may visit the Dauger Research web site.

A representative of Dauger Research, Inc., will be available at next week's SuperComputing 2002 conference to discuss this result.

Dauger Research, Inc., was incorporated and founded by Dr. Dean E. Dauger. Dr. Dauger is the award-winning author of Atom in a Box and Fresnel Diffraction Explorer and has co-authored the award-winning Kai's Power Tools software from 1992 to 1994. After completing his Ph. D. in physics, he founded Dauger Research, Inc., to bridge the divides between the scientifically and technically complex and the mainstream by making high-performance computation and visualization easy to use and accessible to users.