Apple expecting major surge in cluster computing sales: According to reliable sources in Cupertino, Apple is hiring new staff to coordinate large-scale purchases of G5 systems (currently only PowerMacs of course, but soon to include Xserves and possibly the rumored Xstation) for use in clustering systems - scientific, educational, business, and governmental applications primarily.

Documents recently acquired by rumors include a memo which states that "we now expect yearly systems sales directly attributable to clustering/grid computing applications to exceed 50,000 units in 2004 and 80,000 units in 2005." The memo goes on to state that indirect sales for systems that will distribute loads across multiple computers in less formal environments could eventually double those numbers. Xgrid, Apple's distributed computing technology suite, is under heavy development and Apple is hard at work on other aspects of its hardware and software lineup to take into account rapidly growing demand for these technologies -- not just industry-wide, but also very particularly in terms of consumer interest in Apple itself, following the much-publicized Virginia Tech G5-cluster supercomputer.

A supercomputer formed of a cluster of Macintosh G5 PCs has inched higher in the list of the world's fastest machines, ahead of all but two rivals -- and its performance could still improve, according to the system's architect.

According to the latest performance figures fromVirginia Tech's Terascale Cluster, nicknamed the Big Mac, the system is computing at 9.55 trillion operations per second, or teraflops. That puts it behind only Japan's Earth Simulator, at 35.8 teraflops, and the ASCI Q supercomputer, at 13.8 teraflops. The figures were posted in a report by Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the top 500 list.

The Big Mac is turning heads in the high-performance computing world because it has been built for just over $5m (£3.2m), from off-the-shelf Macintosh PCs, in about six months. Top-ranked supercomputers traditionally cost hundreds of millions of pounds and can take years to construct...

The cluster was assembed from 1,100 dual-CPU Macs using IBM's 64-bit G5 processor. Varadarajan said the university paid the full $3,000 price tag for the PCs, and said he had at first considered using processors from Intel or AMD. Intel's Itanium 2 was too slow, while AMD's Opteron was too expensive, Varadarajan said. He said he is planning to upgrade the cluster to Apple's new Panther version of the Mac OS X operating system shortly.