In 2003, Virginia Tech built an 1100-node cluster out of Apple G5 Xserves which was, at the time, the third-fastest supercomputer in the world. Now, the school is building a new supercomputer, this time out of 324 dual-quad core Mac Pros. The director of the project, Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, told Ars Technica the new system will study power-aware software systems that can adjust performance automatically to maximize efficiency and distributed shared memory systems that can run existing threaded coded on high-performance clusters. "The new cluster will provide us with a large scale development and performance tuning platform for both these activities," Varadarajan says.

Expect to hear a lot more about the unnamed Mac Pro supercomputer in the near future -- and not just from Varadarajan and others at the school. When the first Virginia Tech machine, System X, was built, Apple touted the cluster extensively as evidence of the G5's technical prowess and usability in educational and scientific environments.

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