The current rumor around Mac sites is that Viginia Tech has ordered 1,100 Dual 2.0Ghz G5 machines with gobs of RAM for a supercomputing cluster. Interesting.

This may well be tied to the recently announced delay in the shipping of those machines – Apple recognizes the value of quickly filling this order, for reasons both financial and otherwise.

First, this would obviously amount to a large chunk of change for Apple. While they have not been in as sorry a state as many computer manufacturers, they could definitely use this to improve their financial standings come the end of the quarter.

Second, if this would indeed rank in the top five for supercomputers, it would be a good marketing opportunity for Apple. To my knowledge, their systems have never been used in a supercomputer that ranked anywhere near that high. This might also help Apple with corporate customers, showing scalability and ease of deployment.

Personally, I am somewhat surprised that VT would use these systems rather than waiting for the (to my mind) inevitable announcement of PPC970-based Xserves.