The Ideal Mac

By Enza Sebastiani

San Mateo, California - January 2, 2004

2003 has been a very important year for Apple with the releases of the PowerMac G5, the first 64bit desktop, and OS 10.3 a.k.a Panther. This combination of powerful hardware and software allows multimedia artists and users from all backgrounds to process an incredibly humongous amount of data and complex rendering projects. Capable to offer a solid processing power and a maximum bandwidth, the G5 is considered one of the fastest and most manageable computers on the market. At a starting price of $1,799, the G5 line offers the ideal Mac solution. Among the many features, with 1.6GHz pro 800MHz frontside bus, 256MB SDRAM expandable to 4GB SDRAM, 80GB of disk space, a SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW), three PCI Slots, and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200, this new desktop is a big step ahead of the single G4 processor tower at a reasonable price.

The top of the line G5 at $2,999 offers the advantage of two 64-bit IBM PowerPC 970 CPUs running at 2GHz, with 1GHz frontside bus/512K L2 cache/processor, 512MB SDRAM expandable to 8GB SDRAM, a 160GB disk space, a SuperDrive with a dual format DVD burner that allows users to author DVD-R/DVD-RW as well as DVD+R/DVD+RW and a very good video card, the ATI Radeon 9600 Pro.

Who immediately saw the future of this incredible machine and its operating system, OS 10.3, is Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, now director of Virginia Tech’s Terascale Computing Facility. That’s where his vision took the shape of a supercomputer created by 1100 dual processor Power Mac G5s, the support of Apple developers, and the collaboration of many other hardware and software companies, volunteers, consultants and scientists from all over the globe.

This supercomputer is capable to solve the need of every field of study that uses quantitative methods. Theory and experimentation can be finally substituted by “computational science that allows researchers to simulate the behavior of natural or human-engineered systems, instead of merely observing a system or building a physical model of it. This powerful approach enables glimpses into places that are too small, too large, too dangerous, too short-lived, or too long lasting for typical experiments.” http://www.apple.com/education/science/profiles/vatech/

If “Innovation isn't the key to economic growth.” how do you define the creation of a terascale computing machine in less than 3 months at a fraction of the cost? Similar systems in Japan cost up to one billion, including facilities and maintenance. The one at Virginia Tech’s was $4 to $5 million. How’s that as an example of “a strategy for collaborating with developers and makers of complementary products, and a strategy for customer service.” ?