Mac clustering began at the UCLA Plasma Physics Group in 1998.Soon our approach to clustering spread worldwide. In that year, Apple was kind enough to give us publicity in
their inaugural issue of
Apple University Arts (AUA).
AUA
was a tabloid-sized periodical
focused on success stories
on the Macintosh in
higher education.
In this issue's cover story,
Apple gave us the moniker:
"supercomputing for the rest of us".
Creators of the first Mac cluster,
we "reinvented" the cluster computer.
This was a time when the beige G3 and Mac OS 8 were the vanguards of personal computing,
and the Bondi-blue iMac was new.
In the day,
naysayers questioned whether a Macintosh FLOP (floating-point operation)
could be compared to a supercomputer FLOP.
Over time the perceived legitimacy of Macintosh clustering grew into
its status today.
We weren't paid or told to cluster Macs.
We were physicists, working on physics research, developing Mac clusters on the side.
