February 6, 2005 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in partnership with Apple computers has unveiled the new Turing Cluster super-computer. Located in the Digital Computer Laboratory, the Turing Cluster consists of 640 Apple Xserves, each with two 2 GHz G5 processors and 4 GB of RAM, for a total of 1280 processors. All machines in the cluster are also connected by a 100 Mbs switched, full-duplex Ethernet using switches from Cisco Systems, and there is a 1 Gbs link between the front-end array and the primary Cisco switch. The operating system for the Turing Cluster is Mac OS X Server.
The super-computer will be used for data modeling and should reach 5 teraflops processing speed which will place the Turing Cluster in the top 30 super-computers in the world.
The total cost for the project was under $3 million. The University chose Apple computers primarily because of cost and the heat produced by the Apple processors is much less than Intel processors which makes the computer cheaper to maintain.
