University of Texas kyboshes MacNN's cluster story

THERE'S MORE THAN MEETS the eye to a story published by MacNN and reported here today about the cost of a Dell cluster versus an Apple Mac OSX cluster.

See Dell Intel cluster costs 30 times more than Apple system.

Tina Romanella de Marquez, communications and development manager at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), says that the $38 million mentioned by MacNN is for far more than just a supercomputer.

She said: "The $38M total you refer to was not for a single supercomputer. It was announced in February for a total package that included:

"The establishment of the new Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences (ICES) at UT, including:

four new endowed faculty chairs in ICES at UT
additional funding for the research endowment and the visiting scholars endowment in ICES
the completion of construction of the ACES building (the 4th floor) for use by ICES and TACC

"and the establishment of a terascale distributed computing infrastructure at UT, hosted by TACC, including:

two supercomputers at TACC (the cluster you refer to, and the other IBM system
two massive storage systems at TACC
three leading-edge components to increase UT's networking infrastructure
increases in operations funding over five years for ICES and TACC".

She adds: "There are many more things that were needed to create ICES and establish a terascale distributed computing architecture at TACC. This point was made by TACC Director, Jay Boisseau, during the Lonestar dedication ceremony. The value of the specific computer referred to was approximately $3.0 million. And, no tuition funds were used in this process. Most of the money did not even come from UT. The package included $8M in discounts and donations from about 10 leading technology vendors, and over $15M from a generous foundation." And, she continued: "The VaTech number ONLY includes the actual computer, not the cost of the building, power, cooling, people, or anything else needed to actually operate it."

So that comparison goes out the window, then. µ