The Return of Sea Mac

[Sea Mac]

Hello everybody!

I've been missing for about a month now: My Computer was in the shop.

The Computer company I bought from is very reputable with their service plans! With the Old computer I had, I also bought the 3 year parts and labor and phone support 'extended' service plan: 10 days before the 3 years was up I took the old computer in (Under Warranty) for a "Tune Up & Cleaning" because it was whining loudly (dust). They accepted it and said I'd get it back in 3 to 5 days.

Long story short: 21 days later they said they couldn't fix it: and told me they would replace it.

So: they gave me the Brand New model of the Machine I had taken in! It didn't matter that my machine was 3 years old: It was still under factory warranty and in no nonsense fashion they replaced my old broken machine with the Latest Model!

On Valentine's Day I was using my old backup computer (A "Mystic" Gigabit Ethernet 400 MHz G4 Power Mac)

This is what they gave me:  http://www.apple.com/macpro/ a new in the box unit with a BRAND New Warranty and ALL the Software and Accessories!


It's a Dual Quad-Core 64 Bit Xeon Workstation with the "Leopard" OS on it! They just plopped a new unit down in front of me in exchange for the old one!  I gave them a sick M9455LL/A and 22 days later they gave me a NEW MA970LL/A !

(They wrote "Happy Valentines" on the sales slip - On Valentine's day they called me all apologetic and said "How would you like a Mac Pro?" and I said "Thank you for the loaner" and he said "It's not a Loaner: you're keeping it!")



I thought I was delusional from 21 days without email/tripping/dreaming/insane right up until I ACTUALLY Picked it up Yesterday! It's truly one of the fastest workstations in the world! I've NEVER bought anything but Macintosh Computers (If you don't count a Timex/Sinclair 1000            Or a PET 2001 or a C-64 that is ... ) and I've NEVER been Sorry!

The old M9455LL/A was as fast as a CRAY C916 Supercomputer - it could do 16 GigaFLOPS*:

and even by todays standards that is a wicked fast system!

But the MA970LL/A is 5 times as fast at 80 GigaFLOPS!

SWEET!    Noticeably Faster!

Oh, BABY!

So Quiet you can't hear it running! (Yet it moves an awful lot of air over those 2 Xeon CPUs)

So: Sea Mac is BACK! And I'm going to be posting in the Genetic exchange Program topic Very soon!
__________________________________________________________________________________________

* A "GigaFLOP" is a computer benchmarking standard relating to how many mathematical "FLoating point OPerations per second a given system could do (as opposed to how many fixed point "Integer Operations" it could do). In the 1970's a standard was set saying that the definition of the word "Supercomputer" was "one gigaFLOP", or One BILLION Math Operations per second! Background: The U.S. government restricts export of
supercomputers, defined as any computer that does one gigaflop (one
billion floating point instructions per second). The G4 is rated at
1-4 gigaflops, qualifying it as a supercomputer. This TV Commercial caught my eye:

White background. Power Mac G4. Tank driving behind it. Voice
says Power Mac G4 is the first personal computer classified as a
weapon by the federal government. That means it can't be sold in
some nations, although "peace loving" people around the world will
have access to it.

"As for Pentium PCs, they're harmless."
My G4 does 1.6 GigaFLOPS - And the Dual G5 cranked at 16 GigaFLOPS ... but that 8Xeon64 Tower smokes past any other computer I've ever seen!

[Arcygenical]

Wow a dual quaddie... What's the rest of the specs on her? 2GB FBDIMMs? Which video card?

I had an old Powermac G5 back in the day, before I went to windows for my workstation/modding needs (happy with a single quad :p).

Welcome back

[Sea Mac]

Yeah: A Dual Quaddie - 8 screaming cores!    And Dual FSB for no Data Bottlenecking!

My Mac Pro configuration is:

Processors

   * Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5462 “Harpertown” processors (8-cores total)
        * Enhanced Intel Core microarchitecture
          o 12MB of L2 cache per processor (each pair of cores shares 6MB)
          o 128-bit SSE4 SIMD engine
          o 64-bit data paths and registers
          o Energy efficiency optimization
    * 1600MHz, 64-bit dual independent frontside buses

Memory

    * 800MHz DDR2 ECC fully buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) memory (2 GB in there already: 8 RAM slots & each can handle a 4 GB Memory DIMM)
    * Eight FB-DIMM slots on two memory riser cards (four slots per card) supporting up to 32GB of main memory
    * 256-bit-wide memory architecture

Graphics and displays

# Double-wide, 16-lane PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot with a ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT Graphics Card with 256MB of GDDR3 memory and two dual-link DVI ports
# 300W for up to four PCI Express graphics cards
# Support for up to eight 30-inch displays
# Support for digital resolutions up to 2560 by 1600 pixels
# Support for analog resolutions up to 2048 by 1536 pixels
# DVI to VGA adapter included
# Dual-display support for extended desktop and video mirroring modes

Communications

    * Two independent 10/100/1000BASE-T Ethernet (RJ-45) interfaces with support for jumbo frames
    * Bluetooth 2.0 + Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) up to 3Mb/s

Storage

    * Four 3.5-inch cable-free, direct-attach hard drive bays with built-in independent 3Gb/s Serial ATA channels; four internal hard drive carriers included

    * Up to 4TB of internal storage using hard drives in the following capacities:

          o Hard drive bay 1
                + 320GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200 rpm, 8MB cache
                + 500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200 rpm, 16MB cache
                + 750GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200 rpm, 16MB cache
                + 1TB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200 rpm, 32MB cache
                + 300GB Serial Attached SCSI 3Gb/s, 15,000 rpm, 16MB cache

This bay Comes with a 320GB Drive with Leopard Pre-Installed - and they moved all the user data over from the Other Hard Drive to this System

          o Hard drive bay 2
                + 500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200 rpm, 16MB cache
                + 750GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200 rpm, 16MB cache
                + 1TB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200 rpm, 32MB cache
                + 300GB Serial Attached SCSI 3Gb/s, 15,000 rpm, 16MB cache

This bay WOULD HAVE Been Empty but they stuck my 160GB SATA hard drive from "Ph♀enix" (the G5 they 'traded in') in there so I got a FREE 'half size' Hard Drive with my BRAND NEW Computer - and all the data that I left in Ph♀enix!)

          o Hard drive bay 3
                + 500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200 rpm, 16MB cache
                + 750GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200 rpm, 16MB cache
                + 1TB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200 rpm, 32MB cache
                + 300GB Serial Attached SCSI 3Gb/s, 15,000 rpm, 16MB cache

I Took the 300GB SATA Drive that had all my photos and email on it OUT of the Computer I took in! I thought when I got that old Computer back with new fans and a cleaning out that I'd pop that drive in and resume my life from where it was when I took that Computer in! But, NO: Now I'll stick the 300 GB Drive with ALL my important stuff on it into bay #3!

          o Hard drive bay 4
                + 500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200 rpm, 16MB cache
                + 750GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200 rpm, 16MB cache
                + 1TB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200 rpm, 32MB cache
                + 300GB Serial Attached SCSI 3Gb/s, 15,000 rpm, 16MB cache

I've got an External SATA Hard Drive enclosure with a 160 GB? (Not sure ... ) hard drive in it: I'm going to pop that 4th SATA drive in the 4th bay so I'll be running the new computer with nearly a Terabyte of onboard Hard Drive storage! (and ALL of my miles and miles of files - pretty files - on board!)
   

    * 16x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
          o Writes DVD+R and DVD-R discs at up to 16x speed
          o Writes DVD+R DL and DVD-R DL discs at up to 8x speed
          o Writes DVD+RW discs at up to 8x speed
          o Writes DVD-RW discs at up to 6x speed
          o Reads DVDs at up to 16x speed
          o Writes CD-R and CD-RW discs at up to 32x speed
          o Reads CDs at up to 32x speed

    * One open optical drive bay for optional second SuperDrive

I did: I stuffed all 4 SATA Bays with hard drives already!

Electrical and environmental requirements

# Line voltage: 100-120V AC or 200-240V AC (wide-range power supply input voltage)
# Frequency: 50Hz to 60Hz single phase
# Current: Maximum of 12A (low-voltage range) or 6A (high-voltage range)
# Operating temperature: 50° to 95° F (10° to 35° C)
# Storage temperature: -40° to 116° F (-40° to 47° C)
# Relative humidity: 5% to 95% noncondensing
# Maximum altitude: 10,000 feet

Peripherals and audio

Mac Pro Ports

    * Two FireWire 800 ports (one on front panel, one on back panel)
    * Two FireWire 400 ports (one on front panel, one on back panel)
    * Five USB 2.0 ports (two on front panel, three on back panel)
    * Two USB 2.0 ports on included keyboard
    * Front-panel headphone minijack and speaker
    * Optical digital audio input and output TOSLINK ports
    * Analog stereo line-level input and output minijacks

PCI Express expansion

    * Three open full-length PCI Express expansion slots
          o One PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot
          o Two PCI Express x4 slots
    * All slots provide mechanical support for 16-lane cards
    * 300W combined maximum for all PCI Express slots

Software

Mac OS X Leopard & iLife 08

    * Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard (includes Time Machine, Quick Look, Spaces, Spotlight, Dashboard, Mail, iChat, Safari, Address Book, QuickTime, iCal, DVD Player, Photo Booth, Front Row, Xcode Developer Tools)
    * iLife ’08 (includes iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, and GarageBand)

PLUS My old "Tiger" boot drive that has hundreds of dollars of existing software all ready gathered on it! (This Machine comes with "Leopard" and WON'T run "Tiger")

Size and weight

    * Height: 20.1 inches (51.1 cm)
    * Width: 8.1 inches (20.6 cm)
    * Depth: 18.7 inches (47.5 cm)
    * Weight (standard configuration): 42.4 pounds (19.2 kg)8

In the box:

    * Mac Pro
    * Apple Keyboard and Mighty Mouse
    * DVI to VGA adapter
    * USB keyboard extension cable
    * Install/restore DVDs
    * Printed and electronic documentation

$2,799.00 + $217.00 in Sales Tax = $3,016.00

WICKED Wicked FAST!  They call it a "Workstation" for a reason! I've got my own little Renderfarm in there!

And I have a speech recognition program called iListen 1.8 that came with a Plantronics head set: and I am dictating this message to you.

[MstryShovel]

I... fking hate you
no seriously good to have you back, you got a mo-fuggin deal there man, my boss at my gfx job is creaming over those computers (its a smaller one)


so ... do you happen to have that kinda waranty where if you just happened to "loose" the computer they would get you a new one? wink wink nudge nudge

[Sea Mac]

You know, I really didn't plan to get a new machine, it just happened to work out that way - that I traded in a three-year old machine for brand new one!

I blame this entirely on the Ghost of my dead wife Ph♀enix!

As she lay dying I made her promise to Haunt Me!
The Old Dual G5 was Purchased as a birthday gift for me 3 years ago. I named it Ph♀enix: in honor of her passing over to the spirit realm the year before. 10 days before the 3 years was up I took it in & they said they'd clean it up and have it back to me in 3 - 5 days. She is a Dianic witch and she still has significant influence over the material realm despite her being merely dead (not really most sincerely dead).

That 3 year old computer named Ph♀enix Died in their hands - under warranty: on their workbench! They had to replace the enclosure and when they put the old guts in the new case it wouldn't start up. I spoke with the technician (I'm one of them: I know of what I speak) on a technician to technician level about 2 weeks into the ordeal and they'd already replaced the front power board and the motherboard (in a new 3 year old enclosure) ...

I was VERY Sympathetic and calm voiced and said "Intermittent problems are the Fu<k to service: I know! Take your time and do it right." I didn't tell him it was HAUNTED though: I was willing to let them conclude that on their own!

She KILLED IT! Right on their workbench & in their hands: in the LAST Week of the 3 Year Parts, Labor, and Phone Support Warranty I'd had set up with the original gift purchase. She WOULD NOT let it start up again! Clever (dead) Woman! And her Ghost Whispered CLEARLY to me "Happy Valentine's Day, Carl!" apparently at the SAME EXACT TIME that Gareth - the Store Manager - wrote "Happy Valentines" on the receipt showing legal transfer of a DEAD Computer for the Latest Model! (as seen above: 3rd picture in my 1st post!) With the New machine Warranty! Eek!  FREAK!

It's what we wizards refer to as a "Manifestation". It was a Manifestation of true LOVE reaching out from beyond the so called Grave! I BELIEVE in the Power of True Magick: and my faith is the size of 31 Salvia Divinorum seeds! And if you go visit my original garden page you'll see that I BLAME Ph♀enix Publicly for ripening those seeds! WOW! 

Thank You, my Love!

Your boss is understandably creaming over it: they can support up to Eight 30-inch Apple Displays.  It truly is a graphics monster!  (That's why I called it a "Render Farm")

I'm glad to BE back.

The first TOP500 list was published at the Supercomputing 93 Conference in Mannheim (June 1993).  http://top500.org/list/1993/06/100  and on that list my old Dualie G5 comes in as the 8th fastest Computer in the world and the Dual Quaddie Xeon would have been the second fastest Computer in the world!

If any of you have APPLE Computers you are invited to Download "Power Fractal" for free and see how many MegaFLOPS YOUR System can kick!

[Arcygenical]

Yeah, I'm hitting 8 GFLOPS with my Macbook Pro... But I can't get it to run on both cores, I suppose I need to install "pooch" but I can't really be arsed to do it right now.

I'm rather jealous of you... I just wish Apple had better graphics card offerings... Sure, you can put 4 2600 XT's in it and run 8 displays, but they're not all that powerful on their own.

What are you going to be doing with all that horsepower? The combined power on my PC Desktop weighs in at around 58Gflops, with a Q6600 quad core @ 3.6ghz... And I have trouble maxing THAT out...

[Youpi]

Oh My God -> You're fuc***** lucky man !

[Paradoxic]

The mAC is baCK! 

It seems as long as you didnt lose anything you got a nice deal all things considered.

[Sea Mac]

Thank You!

I've harnessed that Power for Science: I've reactivated My SETI@Home account and put all 8 cores to work at once.

In about 18 hours my workstation has an additional 1,241.33 pending credit and 1,268 total credit!

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/results.php?userid=505049 (I don't know if you can view those results or not)

It takes about 2 hours to do a big block ... as opposed to 2 days for my old G4 ...

All I've got is an old 17" CRT ...

7 Hard Drives: 4 inside & 3 on top - A Cable Modem with a 7 MegaBits/Sec. Downstream tap (Cox@Home) ... Printer / Scanner / Speakers / Camcorder / Digital Cameras and a TON of Software! I can pretty much create ANY Thing I like!

"I Got Lucky" is a Mega-Understatement: except I BROKE the word "Lucky" with this: http://members.cox.net/theluckyleprechaun/index.html I get about 15 hits a day and a LOT of People out there have gotten some Incredible good luck from those photos! You see: I never picked those lucky clovers so the luck went into the photos - It's my experiment in transmitting "Magick" over the internet! (Conclusion: Magick is readily transmitted over the internet IF YOU BELIEVE IT CAN BE!)

Nope: Didn't lose a byte of Data. I've got over a TeraByte of Storage and it's about 70% full - I have all my files back to 1998! YOW!

[Sea Mac]

Yeah, I'm hitting 8 GFLOPS with my Macbook Pro... But I can't get it to run on both cores, I suppose I need to install "pooch" but I can't really be arsed to do it right now.

I'm rather jealous of you... I just wish Apple had better graphics card offerings... Sure, you can put 4 2600 XT's in it and run 8 displays, but they're not all that powerful on their own.

What are you going to be doing with all that horsepower? The combined power on my PC Desktop weighs in at around 58Gflops, with a Q6600 quad core @ 3.6ghz... And I have trouble maxing THAT out...

Hmmmmm ... 8 GF seems low ...
But Power Fractal ONLY needs Pooch to run cores OUTSIDE of the Laptop ... It SHOULD be running on Both Cores at once!

Check and be sure that both cores are detected ... and neither of those two lines are checked!

Apple offers several choices in Graphics cards:

http://www.apple.com/macpro/specs.html

Graphics and displays

    * Double-wide, 16-lane PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot with one of the following graphics cards installed:
          o ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of GDDR3 memory and two dual-link DVI ports
          o NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of GDDR3 memory and two dual-link DVI ports
          o NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB of GDDR3 memory, two dual-link DVI ports, and one stereo 3D port
     

    * Multiple graphics card configurations including two, three, or four ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT cards
    * 300W for up to four PCI Express graphics cards
    * Support for up to eight 30-inch displays
    * Support for digital resolutions up to 2560 by 1600 pixels
    * Support for analog resolutions up to 2048 by 1536 pixels
    * DVI to VGA adapter included
    * Dual-display support for extended desktop and video mirroring modes

[Arcygenical]

Yeah, I had forgotten that I modified a system .kext file, forcing my CPU to underclock to 1000-1200mhz, rather than the stock 2200mhz...

Thus the reason I was scoring only 8GFLOPS, rather than the 19GFLOPS I scored when re-testing.

Much nicer figure, but way hotter, and eats more battery

[Sea Mac]

Yeah, I had forgotten that I modified a system .kext file, forcing my CPU to underclock to 1000-1200mhz, rather than the stock 2200mhz...

Thus the reason I was scoring only 8GFLOPS, rather than the 19GFLOPS I scored when re-testing.

Much nicer figure, but way hotter, and eats more battery

Oooooo: 19 GigaFLOPS is Schweet!

That's more horsepower than the system at #9 on this list: http://top500.org/list/1993/06/100

That is to say ...

Your "laptop" has More Computing horsepower than the CRAY C916 supercomputer and weighs a couple of tons less!


Fifteen years ago your laptop would have been the 9th fastest Supercomputer in the WORLD!
Wayyyyy Cool!

[Sea Mac]

What are you going to be doing with all that horsepower?

I have been running Multi-Beam SETI@Home for 31 hours and have 3,614 total credits in that time!

Can you see these results?  http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=4220102 Or does it ask you for a password?

This is what it says:

IP address   Show IP address
Domain name   ip68-101-214-74.sd.sd.cox.net
Local Standard Time   UTC -8 hours
Name   ip68-101-214-74.sd.sd.cox.net
Created   19 Feb 2008 0:26:27 UTC
Total Credit   3,614
Recent average credit   342.32
CPU type   GenuineIntel
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5462 @ 2.80GHz [x86 Family 6 Model 23 Stepping 6]
Number of CPUs   8
Operating System   Darwin
9.2.0
Memory   2048 MB
Cache   976.56 KB
Swap space   99382.74 MB
Total disk space   297.65 GB
Free Disk Space   96.81 GB
Measured floating point speed   3140.93 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed   7323.67 million ops/sec
Average upload rate   41.17 KB/sec
Average download rate   685.99 KB/sec
Average turnaround time   0.9 days
Maximum daily WU quota per CPU   100/day
Tasks   276
Number of times client has contacted server   231
Last time contacted server   20 Feb 2008 7:37:49 UTC
% of time BOINC client is running   99.9913 %
While BOINC running, % of time work is allowed   99.9895 %
Average CPU efficiency   0.942691
Task duration correction factor   0.283131

[DrYRHead]

Welcomed back SeaMac. 

[Sea Mac]

Thank you!

This thing is FAST! 2 hours is amazing for a Seti Block!


Yow! that's half speed because the browser can't reload as fast as the graphics card can!

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=4220102  I don't know if that link will work for you ...