I am working on structural biochemistry in a research lab in California (University of California - Davis), and our needs for computing power are pretty important. Sooner or later we would need a cluster in order to relieve our SGI and Linux stations. Most of our applications being open-source, making them run on any kind of UNIX environment is no big deal. Consequently, I use my PowerBook G4 on a daily basis, instead of other workstations, because its power and the flexibility of OS X make everything faster.
It's benchmarks obtained from my laptop that brought the lab to consider more seriously the option of selecting a Xserve G5 cluster.
For this project, Apple's support was amazing, and illustrates how the company is interested in this field.
Therefore, I could test the Xserve G5 2x2Ghz and PowerMac 2x2Ghz for three weeks. An Apple engineer followed the whole project, and I was invited, among other University researchers, for one day at Cupertino's Infinite Loop for a seminar regarding "High Performance Computing". A whole bunch of engineers in charge of Tiger, Xserve or PowerMac detailed us how to optimize code for G5, and presented the Xserve clustering solutions. The demos made by those guys were absolutely amazing! We could chat with them, especially with engineers working on the G5 water-cooling (lots of troubles) and also about the famous Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT. Though we had no access to restricted information, discussing with those people was really a great time.
I'd like to stress the fact that those guys are really willing to know our wishes and needs, and are concerned by the problems we meet with hard- and software.
With the following outcome: we ordered a cluster of 6 Xserve Dual G5, that we hope to bring up to 16 nodes. Delivery was ultrafast: 3 days. We have 1 Xserve server, and 5 cluster nodes, linked altogether by Gigabit. One Apple engineer helps me when I need it, for setting up the cluster.
A long talk to testify that, at contrary to what can be heard from time to time in the scientific community, Apple is extremely involved in customer relationships.
I'm 100% satisfied.
Of course, the geographic proximity of the lab and Apple's one had probably a major role to play in the strong and direct involvement of Apple's engineers. We'd like to talk with them too :)
