Meanwhile, we know that the G5 supercomputer is delivering more pluck per processor than any other supercomputer out there, but what about bang for the buck? Well, remember how Virginia Tech announced that they went with G5s because they were so much cheaper than Dells? Now we've got something amounting to proof: faithful viewer Pedro Henriquez notes that Michael Dell had yet another one of his psychotic "Gotta Be Steve" episodes recently and had a Dell supercomputer built at a big university. Surprise, surprise. The only problem is, he didn't copycat the move quite enough to deliver anything close to the same degree of raw performance-- or the same cost savings.

According to the Austin Business Journal, about a week ago, the University of Texas took the wraps off of "Lonestar," the "most powerful supercomputer for academic research"-- well, in Texas, anyway. It's nowhere near as big as Virginia Tech's "Big Mac," since UT's cluster consists of only "300 computer servers from Round Rock-based Dell Inc." A press release from July notes that each server houses dual Xeon processors (at an unspecified clock speed), so it's a 600-processor cluster, versus the 2,200-processor cluster at Virginia Tech. Gee, and we thought they built everything bigger in Texas; clearly we were misinformed.

There's no mention of the cluster's LINPACK score-- we'll have to wait for November's standings to know for sure-- but with a theoretical peak performance of only 3.67 teraflops, Lonestar would probably only rank somewhere between 18th and 30th on last June's list of the top 500 supercomputers. Theoretically, Virginia Tech's cluster is 4.8 times more powerful, and even when Lonestar bumps up to 1,000 processors by the end of 2004, it'll still lag by nearly a factor of 3. And here's the kicker: Virginia Tech spent $5.2 million on Big Mac; guess how much the Dell-based Lonestar is going to cost?

$38 million.

Yup, Lonestar cost over seven times as much as Big Mac, and theoretically delivers less than a quarter of its performance. So much for Dell always winning on price, hmm?

You know that age-old IT maxim that "no one ever got fired for buying Intel"? That may change now that buying Intel can represent a loss of millions of dollars. By the way, Japan's Earth Simulator, which currently ranks as the fastest supercomputer on the planet, is theoretically 2.3 times as powerful as Big Mac-- but it reportedly cost about $350 million to build. If G5s had been around last year, the Japanese could've built three Big Macs instead for about $15.6 million. Chronological disparity (and the fact that the Earth Simulator doesn't actually use Intel chips) aside, do you suppose whoever greenlit the budget on that project is going to get fired for overspending by over a third of a billion dollars? Maybe not, but we bet an end-of-the-year bonus is out of the question...