System X was a supercomputer assembled by Virginia Tech in the summer of 2003, that was originally composed of 1,100 Apple Power Mac G5 computers. System X ran at 12.25 Teraflops, (20.24 peak), and was ranked #280 in the July 2008 edition of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. It was replaced by SystemG, a cluster of Apple Mac Pro machines with a total of 2048 processing cores, in 2008. Coincidentally, SystemG ranked at #280 in the November 2008 edition of TOP500, while running at 16.87 Teraflops. This was the first time that the Virginia Tech cluster maintained its ranking.
The supercomputer's name (pronounced "System Ten") 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. The supercomputer is also known as "Big Mac" or Terascale Cluster. On November 16, 2003, it was ranked by the TOP500 list as the third-fastest supercomputer in the world. It is also touted as "the world’s most powerful and cheapest homebuilt supercomputer." [1]
System X was constructed with a relatively low budget of just $5.2 million, in the span of only three months, thanks in large part to using off-the-shelf G5 computers. (By comparison, the Earth Simulator, the fastest supercomputer at the time, cost approximately $400 million to build.)
In 2004, Virginia Tech upgraded its computer to Apple's newly-released Xserve G5 servers. The upgraded version ranked #7 in the 2004 TOP500 list.
In October 2004, Virginia Tech partially rebuilt System X at a cost of about $600,000. These improvements brought the computer's speed up to 12.25 Teraflops, which placed System X #14 on the 2005 TOP500 list.
Virginia Tech's system was the model for Xseed, a smaller system also made from Xserve servers and built by Bowie State University in Maryland. Xseed was ranked #166 in the 2005 TOP500.
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