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Two double-precision floating-point units enable the dual 2GHz Xserve G5 to perform
the linear equations 8 percent faster than the 3.2GHz Xeon-based servers and 50 percent
faster than the 2GHz Opteron-based server.
BLAST
To demonstrate the advantages of Xserve G5 for processor-intensive scientific analysis,
Apple used Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, or BLAST. BLAST is a popular open
source biotechnology application used by life science researchers to find matches in
DNA and protein sequences. BLAST searches are based on word size, or the number
of nucleotide pairs specified by the researcher to register as a match. Different word
sizes are used for different kinds of research, and users can adjust word size to the
sensitivity appropriate to their needs. With long-word-size, or high-performance,
searches, the researcher is looking for similarities between DNA sequences that are
nearly identical. For short-word-size searches (fewer than11), the researcher is com-
paring more distantly related sequences; these searches require high resolution to
find the small matches between dissimilar sequences.
In common searches using a word size of more than 11, Xserve G5 far outperformed
the Xeon-based servers. Even at word size 11, for which NCBI BLAST has been extensively
optimized, Xserve G5 performed on par with the competition.
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.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
Word length
Millions of nucleotides per second
Dual 2GHz Xserve G5
Dual 2GHz IBM eServer x325
Dual 3.2GHz IBM eServer x335
Dual 3.2GHz Dell PowerEdge 1750
Xserve G5
Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5
Dell PowerEdge 1750
Dual 3.2GHz Xeon
IBM eServer x335
Dual 3.2GHz Xeon
IBM eServer x325
Dual 2GHz Opteron
9 gigaflops
Billions of floating-point operations per second (gigaflops)
246810
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Technology Overview
Xserve G5
LINPACK: Double-Precision Calculations
BLAST: DNA Sequence Matching
$333 per gigaflop
Apple offers compute power at the
lowest cost per gigaflop of any tier-
one vendor—only $333 per gigaflop,
or $333,000 per teraflop.
5
A/G BLAST
A/G BLAST is a version of NCBI BLAST
developed by Apple in collaboration with
Genentech. Optimized for dual PowerPC G5
processors, the Velocity Engine, and the
symmetric multiprocessing capabilities of
Mac OS X, A/G BLAST makes a wide variety
of searches available at higher speeds.