Five years ago, Virginia Tech burst onto the high-performance computing scene using Apple Power Mac G5 computers to build System X, one of the fastest supercomputers of its time.

Virginia Tech's Center for High-End Computing Systems (CHECS) and professors of computer science

have architected a new supercomputer.

the new System G supercomputer is twice as fast as its predecessor

System G clocks in at an incredible 22.8 TFlops (or trillion operations per second).

the machine consists of 325 Mac Pro computers; each with two 4-core 2.8 gigahertz (GHz) Intel Xeon processors and eight gigabytes (GB) random access memory (RAM).

the first supercomputer running over quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand (40Gbs) interconnect technology

state-of-the-art communication rates (e.g., data sets consisting of nearly one billion numbers traveling between any two compute nodes in one second, with the first value arriving in one-millionth of a second)

unprecedented levels of data movement can be considered.