Apple is not the company you normally think of when you hear the word “supercomputer”, but nevertheless it can now count itself among the ranks of the supercomputing elite, courtesy of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Technicians and students at Virginia Tech have assembled a supercomputer using 1,100 64 bit G5 Apple Macs. In effect, they have linked together 2,200 IBM p5 chips and the result is a massive processing capability capable of 7.41 trillion operations per second.

As far as supercomputers go, that makes it at least the fourth fastest in the world. Virginia Tech is still taking measurements and is suggesting that the final rating may be significantly greater. The three faster machines (in order) are the Japanese Earth Simulator, a machine at the Los Alamos Laboratory and one at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

If you’re thinking “so what?”, the “so what” is that this computer was assembled in the space of about one month using a largely volunteer labour force and cost just a little over $5million. Compare that to the typical $100million to $250million and many months that it normally costs to assemble a world leading supercomputer. Supercomputers are normally put together slowly in a custom built manner that takes time and money – although the Lawrence Livermore system which has 2,304 Intel Xeon processors was also assembled on the cheap, with an estimated cost of somewhere between $10m to $15m. It is slightly faster than the Virginia Tech machine at 7.63 trillion operations per second.

The decision to assemble the computer seems to have been almost a spontaneous act. Sceintists from Virginia Tech met with Apple in June this year just after it launched its new screamingly fast 64 bit desktop and Apple agreed to provide the college with some of the first machines off the line. It turns out to have been a clever move by Apple that will undoubtedly increase its credibility in many areas outside academia.