PowerPC

[Greg Lindahl]

> When programs are compiled correctly, and written with AltiVec
instructions,
> theoretically up to 3.6 gigaflops can be acheived.

Right. Comments like this are the major reason that advertising in this
community with conventional methods tends to fail. The gigaflops thing may
play well to an iMac buyer, but not most beowulf buyers, who often want to
see what the box actually does on their code before leaping to buy.

> This system, 1U rackmount, under $2500 each.  Would this be a good idea
for a
> beowulf?

Sure, if they were cheaper. Sometimes people care about power consumption,
and I happen to know these guys are pretty good in that department, although
you didn't list that in your features list. The size of cache (2 megs per
processor) is pretty good, which might be a big help to some particular
apps. But the cpus themselves (and their main memory bandwidth) are pretty
slow, and no amount of talking up AltiVec is going to erase that fact.

-- greg