“I was in the market for a new machine. I was hoping to get ten teraflops by the end of the year. I'd never used a Mac and had been looking at Dells and IBMs. Then Apple released the G5 on June 23. A week later I bought 1,100 duals online at the Apple Store. I'm Srinidhi Varadarajan and I build Supercomputers at Virginia Tech.”

This story actually occurred although the parody of the “Switcher” commericial did not. Its a pretty impressive story of how product delivery times alter the path of research. Mr. Varadarajan wanted to build a supercomputer this year and Apple could deliver. He made the adjustments and he has a G5 cluster pushing 9.8 teraflops. By the end of year he believes he can another 10%. Hey, did I mention I graduated from Virginia Tech.