OK, one more time on new iMacs. Turns out the rumors swirling around a new iMac were more-or-less correct. Apple officially announced this week that they’ve “stopped taking orders for the current iMac as we begin the transition… to an all-new iMac line which will be announced and available in September”. So, there you have it. Apple went on to say that they had planned on having the next generation iMac ready by now, but their “planning was obviously less than perfect”. There is no official word on this, but it’s a good bet that the new iMac will sport a G5 processor, and most likely a new form factor as well. In typical Apple fashion, there’ll probably be no concrete details for some time. If you’re in the market for either an eMac or iMac, and you don’t need one tomorrow, I’d wait until September. That’s just my opinion – I could be wrong.

You may remember that last fall I was talking about the semi-annual ranking of supercomputers called the “Top 500 List”, maintained by the University of Mannheim (Germany) and the University of Tennessee (Tennessee). The current entries have already begun computing in a super fashion in pursuit of the “poll positions” on the upcoming list. How will Virginia Tech University’s “Big Mac” entry from last year, a cluster of out-of-the-box PowerMac G5s, do this year? OK, it’s a trick question. They’re not entered. Why not? They’re converting their supercomputer to newer, faster G5 Xserves, and the conversion won’t be done in time for the upcoming list.

G5-based supercomputers are still in the news, however. Officials at UCLA’s (the L.A. in California) Plasma Physics Group are building a cluster of 256 G5 Xserves, to do (you guessed it) Plasma Physics research. The Group researched several different platforms, and found the Xserve system to be the most cost-effective solution.

Another group finding the Xserve to be the “cluster to muster” is a contractor doing research work to model the complex aerothermodynamics of hypersonic flight for the U.S. Army. They’ll call it “Multiple Advanced Computers for Hypersonic research, or “MACH 5”. (If they were Dells or Sonys they’d call them something creative like the “DS-1A89V Pro”). The group will install a cluster of 1566 Xserve Macs, which should have a peak performance of 25 teraflops, or 25 trillion operations per second. Not bad for a “toy computer that’s good for graphics”.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski