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pauld · Jul 2, 2002, 05:04 AM

Does anyone know of a link to the story on MacNN:-

"Apple today announced that is has begun shipping Xserve, its new rack-mount server, and tht it has received orders for over 4,000 Xserve servers since its introduction in May. Apple also released "industry standard performance tests," which show that Xserve outperforms more expensive, similarly configured server offerings (from Dell, IBM, and Sun) in web serving, disk performance and running the mission-critical Biotech application BLAST. (MacNN noted that the Xserve began shipping late last week to customers.)"

I'd love to see the raw data on BLAST speeds on Xserve v Sun but there doesn't seem to be a link from this story.

P.S. I'm sorry I'm posting this here but I can't seem to be able to post replies to messages in the Reader Reaction section of MacNN (if anyone can help me out here I'd appreciate it)

Scotttheking · Jul 7, 2002, 09:37 PM

try contacting an apple sales rep?

utidjian · Jul 10, 2002, 07:42 AM

For some reason the story is light on the details... I took a look at Apples website and found:
<a href="http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/math_science/applegenentechblast.html" target="_blank">http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/math_science/applegenentechblast.html</a>

You can also find more stuff by just searching for "BLAST" at apple.com.

You can also get the code for BLAST for a number of platforms from:
<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/" target="_blank">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/</a>

Then run your own benchmarks. I, for one, would be interested in your results.

[ 07-10-2002, 07:43 AM: Message edited by: utidjian ]

Heady · Jul 11, 2002, 08:12 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by pauld:
I'd love to see the raw data on BLAST speeds on Xserve v Sun but there doesn't seem to be a link from this story.<hr /></blockquote>I think this was posted fairly recently:

<a href="http://www.apple.com/xserve/performance.html" target="_blank">http://www.apple.com/xserve/performance.html</a>

I have no idea what BLAST does, but the results sure look impressive:

<blockquote>quote:<hr />From Apple.com:
At the short word length of 9, the Xserve is 21 times faster than the IBM eServer x330 and 52 times faster than the Sun Fire V100. Xserve performs this search in only 9 minutes, versus nearly 3 hours on the IBM eServer x330, and over 7 hours on the Sun Fire V100.

Even though NCBI-BLAST has been optimized for searches of word lengths of 11, Xserve outperforms the IBM eServer x330 and the Sun Fire V100 at this word length by 5% and 163%, respectively.

At the long word length of 40, Xserve is 5.8 times faster than the IBM eServer x330 and 13.4 times faster than the Sun Fire V100 � Xserve completes this search in approximately 16 seconds, while the IBM x330 takes 96 seconds.
<hr /></blockquote>Hope that's what you were looking for.

-Heady

[ 07-11-2002, 08:14 PM: Message edited by: Heady ]