Has anyone Ever played Ghost Recon?

[Ace]

sorry to burst your bubble, but the fastest computers in the world are not macs.
crays, suns, and other supercomputers eat terraflops for breakfast,far more calculation than a mac can do in a day
of course, last time i checked, i didnt have to have a liquid nitrogen cooling system for my imac

Do you even know how much a teraflop is? I don't know too much about crays but you can be damn sure none of them can get anywhere close to a teraflop. A cluster of I believe 233 G4's could only achieve approximately 1/5 of a teraflop.

[Grifter]

Gotta argue with you here Brain.

First, Sun servers aren't that fast.  We have some very, very big sun servers at work (24 processors each) and they are not in the league of Big Blue or Ultra White or any of the other super computers.  They handle a lot of data fast, but no faster then any Beowolf class (I'll talk more about this later).

Second, Cray's are on the down slope.  I was there when Ford installed their Cray.  Very cool to see the waterfall cooling system.... but it's not the shit it was in the 80's.

Third, yes, there are computers that have seen teraflops (afterall, the fastest mac's see 20gigaflops or so...  which is 1/50th of a teraflop.)

Last, the absolute shit in data processing today is Beowolf class computer clusters.  These were first started around 10 years ago when one of the university labs (Berkley if I remember correctly) had 20 sun sparc 20's laying around (with the ultra sparc's out, these weren't that hot of machine).  So they did a little experiment on them.  They put three eithernet cards in each.  One card was connected with a crossover to the computer before it, on card was connected with a crossover to the computer after it, and one card was connected to the switch in the middle.  This formed a circle of computers with super redundant connections (which later proved unnecessary).  They then played with the operating system (solaris 6 at the time I think) and came up with a way for the first computer to take a problem, break off a piece and give it to computer number two, which would break off a piece and give it to computer nubmer three... and around the circle it went... when it got back to computer number one it would either break off another piece if it was done with the first one, or if not, just pass it on to number two...

You get the idea.  What they found was something that was on par with the fastest supercomputers of the day.... at a fraction of the cost.  Think about it... they used what was considered outdated computers which needed no specail cooling or environment.... and was running a comercial unix program (so not all software had to be written for it) that could run that fast.  

Other experiments have been going on with this for the last decade.... Pooch for the macs comes to mind for this discussion.

Now, think about connecting 250 or so Dual G4's at 20 gigaflops each connected with gigabit eithernet to some nice expensive switches.... sure, you wont see 100% usage on them.... but you'd see terraflops coming out of your ass.

Now, why don't you see this?  What in the hell for?  No matter how you slice it, performance is expensive.  I could cluster 12 G4 Dual 1ghz and outperform my Sun e4500, and for less cost I assure you.  But then I'd have one fast ass mac with not much to use it for...  Running a web server or application server.... too much gun.  Running a web farm.... ok, but I could have done that without clustering.  These systems are good for big calculations only... breaking codes.. the human genome project... seti... that sort of thing.  And that's what they are being used for.  

BTW, the mac clusters are out performing other clusters in the human gnome project from an article I read 5 months ago.

Remember... it's all about the floating point calculations per second.  That's the bottom line.  And Mac's stand up with anyone there.... maybe not at the front every time... but not far behind.

[WeaSelFlinK]

Yup, Grift said it all.

-Beefy, 38.2?C fever.

[Brain]

so i was wrong on a few numbers, and i had some old facts
my point was still valid, macs(1 stand alone computer) are not the fastest computer on the planet

[Grifter]

well... you can't really count a mac pc against a sun e4000 then,  because that's comparing apples to oranges (pun intended).

The e4000 series has all those chips... same with AS/400's or RS/6000's which are just bigger boxes with more and more chips (the latter by IBM).... and you can just keep going up that ladder....  

If you want to talk about the fastest computer, compare home consumer machines for around the same price (where Macs will stack up, win or lose).  If you want to talk about fastest single chip platform you can find.... I think that's an compaq alpha-T64Uv4.0d/EV67 today(somewhere around 65 gigaflops I think I read, but don't quote me, because I'm not on top of that subject).  Those 64 bit alpha chips do rock.  But try to find one for sale... then try to afford it.

[Brain]

something tells me that  that would cost me about as much as i spend for a semester of college, maybe two

[Grifter]

You go to a real exclusive private school?

No?

Better notch it up a few more semesters.... heh.

[Brain]

1 or 2 years?(including books)

[j47]

Guys-
ive played GR on sp and mp. Graphics are great! but its fucken hard to find tangos cause the maps are TOOOOOOO big for 16 tangos! Anyways, I dont recommend GR.Mp, its just like playing RS on the mac, LAGGY! You guys should check out Medal of Honor Allied Assult. Its based off the D-Day.

[WeaSelFlinK]

I heard they asked producer Steven Spielberg to recapture the landing in Normandy from his award winning movie "Saving Private Ryan" and set it to the game. Funny, isn't it?

-Beefy, wheezing badly.

[j47]

lol.... just play Medal of Honor or RtWC, its just like being there. I prefer Medal of Honor.

[Destructo]

Wow,

Can someone shut grifter up? holy shitballs...lol....i basically bounced my forehead off the desk tryin to stay awake to read the post.

Anyway, we all own pc's cause IBM's biggest customer is Mac, so therefore, your are actually using a PC.

Mac=PC parts. the only diff is the chip and the operating system. oh, and the price.

Just like mazda. They are made by ford. therefore, in reality, they are actually ford's.

[TeeEfSix Goku]

Casper,since im a sniper,i bought this game and it owns,i take it favorably becuase it is more of a stealthy sniperish game.ITS THE BEST GAME EVER!(no im not giving up rs)

[Casper]

how did this turn in to pc vs macs??


and goku i realy like Ghost recon, because i like to snipe to and i couldn't agree more that is like more of a sniper game.