System X (supercomputer)

Costing US$5.2 million,[1] it was originally composed of 1,100 Apple Power Mac G5 computers[2] with dual 2.0 GHz processors.

System X ran at 12.25 Teraflops, (20.24 peak), and was ranked #3 on November 16, 2003 [4] and #280 in the July 2008 edition of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

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.

"[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 Power Mac G5 computers.

The upgraded version ranked #7 in the 2004 TOP500 list and its server-grade error-correcting memory solved the problem of cosmic ray interference.