SUPERCOMPUTERS
The government may consider your Apple Power Mac G4 a supercomputer, but don't let it go to your head. To reach the top of the latest Top 500 Supercomputers list, you'll need another 2,000 G4s.
When a team from the University of Mannheim and the University of Tennessee unveils the new list - it's updated every six months - at the SC99 supercomputing conference in Portland, Oregon, nearly a third of the previous top performers will have fallen off. The new speed champ is the revamped ASCI Blue-Pacific cluster at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California. Its 5,856 Motorola PowerPC 604e processors are the same kind that powered pre-G3 Macs, but they're networked by pipes 1,500 times fatter than a T1 line. The machine has been clocked at more than 2 trillion floating-point operations per second - 2,000 times faster than the G4's 1-gigaflop performance.
For consumers intent on buying a restricted supercomputer, Apple's ads are, for now, true: The G4's Velocity Engine Motorola processor could exceed the current 2-gigaflop theoretical limit on freely exported hardware. But within the next few months, the export bar will be raised to 6.5 gigaflops.
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