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Wait what Mac?
The Big Mac. 3rd fastest when it was built and also the cheapest, costing only $5.2 million.
3rd fastest
And 1st tastiest
Interesting. It's like those data centers that ran on thousands of Xboxes
Wha?
(searches interwebs)
Wow, that completely passed me by...
I think it was PS3 that shipped with "Other OS" functionality, and were sold a little cheaper than production costs would indicate, to make it up on games.
Only thing is, a bunch of institutions discovered you could order a pallet of PS3's, set up Linux, and have a pretty skookum cluster for cheap.
I'm pretty sure Sony dropped "Other OS" not because of vague concerns of piracy, but because they were effectively subsidizing supercomputers.
Don't know if any of those PS3 clusters made it onto Top500.
It was 33rd in 2010:
In November 2010, the Air Force Research Laboratory created a powerful supercomputer, nicknamed the "Condor Cluster", by connecting together 1,760 consoles with 168 GPUs and 84 coordinating servers in a parallel array capable of 500 trillion floating-point operations per second (500 TFLOPS). As built, the Condor Cluster was the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world and was used to analyze high definition satellite imagery at a cost of only one tenth that of a traditional supercomputer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html
Makes me think how PS2 had export restrictions because "its graphics chip is sufficiently powerful to control missiles equipped with terrain reading navigation systems"
That's so friggin cool to think about!
Oh Xserve, we hardly knew ye 😢
Mac is a flavor of Unix, not that surprising really.
Mac is also also derived from BSD since it is built on Darwin
Apple had its current desktop environment for it's proprietary ecosystem built on BSD with their own twist while supercomputers are typically multiuser parallel computing beats, so I'd say it is really fucking surprising. Pretty and responsive desktop environments and breathtaking number crunchers are the polar opposites of a product. Fuck me, you'll find UNIX roots in Windows NT but my flabbers would be ghasted if Deep Blue had dropped a Blue Screen.