Nothing exceeds like excess. Not only is this a frighteningly huge thinking machine, it also wins the award for IT/marketing synergy of the year:
Virginia Tech struck a deal with Apple to build a terascale supercomputing cluster composed of 1,100 dual-processor Mac G5s.
Since this – the 64-bit workstation that has been touted as the fastest personal computer on the planet – is a product for the often-playful Mac community, one wonders whether the first post-research joint press release will be the computation of the subatomic structure of the tobacco leaf proving the existence of Satan, or a betting scandal in which a freshman hacker computes the winning line on every VT football game well into 2005 and makes himself a billionaire.
Further pictures of the monster can be found here