System X (pronounced "System Ten") was a supercomputer assembled by Virginia Tech's Advanced Research Computing facility in the summer of 2003. Costing US$5.2 million, it was originally composed of 1,100 Apple Power Mac G5 computers with dual 2.0 GHz processors. System X was decommissioned on May 21, 2012. The supercomputer is also known as Big Mac or Terascale Cluster.
System X ran at 12.25 Teraflops, (20.24 peak), and was ranked #3 on November 16, 2003 and #280 in the July 2008 edition of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. The system used error-correcting (ECC) RAM, which is important for accuracy due to the rate of bits flipped by cosmic rays or other interference sources in its vast number of RAM chips.
Background
The supercomputer's name originates from the use of the Mac OS X operating system for each node, and because it was the first university computer to achieve 10 teraflops on the high performance LINPACK benchmark. In 2003 it was also touted as "the world's most powerful and cheapest homebuilt supercomputer." System X was constructed with a relatively low budget...
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