And so it begins again for Virginia Tech

Benchmarking has begun on the new and improved 2200 CPU G5 Xserve based System X supercomputer at the Terascale Computing Facility at Virginia Tech. From their webpage:

System X Upgrade In Progress:

* Assembly - Completed!
* System Stablization - In Process
* Benchmarking - In Process

We can follow the progress of the benchmarking in this PDF (Table 3: Highly Parallel Computing), which is frequently updated by Dr. Jack Dongarra, one of the authors of the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites list. Public tours of the Terascale Computing Facility also begin today.

For those of you interested in the history of System X, there is a good article about it by Virginia Tech here (in which ironically they credit Dell for planting the idea in their heads), and a video by Apple here.