Apple ships Xserve G5 server

Apple has begun taking orders for its Xserve G5 server, claiming that the device's 30 GFlops of processing power make it 60 per cent more powerful than the PowerPC G4-based Xserve.

Single-processor 2.0GHz Xserve G5 servers are available immediately, while the dual-processor 2.0GHz and cluster-optimised dual 2.0GHz Xserve G5 servers will start shipping in April.

Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, Philip Schiller, said in a statement: "Xserve G5 is a big hit with customers who want a powerful 1U rack-mount server.

"With dual G5 processing power, massive storage, incredible I/O performance and Apple's Mac OS X Server software included, Xserve G5 is affordable, easy to manage and easy to cluster."

In a parallel move Apple also introduced its Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics, designed to create high-performance computing cluster for scientific applications.

The company claimed that installation and maintenance for the cluster have also been "greatly simplified" so that little or no IT support is required.

Earlier this year, Apple unveiled computational clustering technology dubbed Xgrid.

Xgrid combines the processing power of all available networked IT resources, including desktops and servers, by creating a grid-enabled 'virtual' IT environment to execute batch and workload processing.

With Xgrid running on Xserve G5 servers in a 42U rack, up to 84 Power PC G5 processors can be clustered to create a supercomputer with 1.5Tflops of processing power.