Black Budget: Bowie State University Builds $1M Apple Supercomputer

Bowie State University Builds $1M Apple Supercomputer

A small school in Maryland followed the lead of Virginia Tech and the University of Illinois by building a new cluster composed of Apple Xserves.

Bowie State University has built a $1 million supercomputer in cooperation with Apple Computer, Inc. XSEED is a 224-node cluster based on Apple's Xserve G5. Using Apple's Mac OS X Server interface, each server is equipped with dual 2GHz G5 processors and is interconnected with a Myrinet 4 Gbit/sec switch. The combination of this cutting edge technology places XSEED among the world's top 100 most powerful supercomputers. The supercomputing cluster will enable high-end graphics, animation, and complex computational problems among other capabilities.

Professor Mark Matties, the technical lead for the cluster project, gives credit to BSU's president, Dr. Calvin Lowe, for having the vision and leadership to bring the idea to life.

"He had been mulling over the possibilities, but had not identified anyone at BSU who could actually build it," says Matties.

"I had sent in a very modest grant proposal to build a small infrastructure to do some research using Dave Anderson's BOINC framework.

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