According to Top 500, Virginia Tech’s cluster of Apple XServes is now only 7th in the list of supercomputers. This kind of news causes ripples in the Apple community. But I can’t think why.

So I had this thought: Universities and other institutions seem bent on getting faster supercomputer clusters. It’s obvious that they do this for prestige and to gather funds, sponsorship and work from businesses that need the computing power to solve their problems.

However, if Virginia Tech are like any other organisation that has supercomputers, they spend a lot of time replacing them or upgrading them. Which means there’s quite a bit of downtime. If they have time to upgrade, then surely they don’t have enough work, ergo they don’t need to upgrade. On the other hand, if they have enough work, but they have the time to upgrade, then they must have enough capacity to meet all their computational requirements, ergo they don’t need to upgrade.

I have a suspicion that they’d do equally well with one XServe… or maybe it’s just to keep students and post-graduates occupied during the holidays.