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Student and Professor Build Budget Supercomputer

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the rivals-of-my-alma-mater dept.

Luke writes "This past winter Calvin College professor Joel Adams and then Calvin senior Tim Brom built Microwulf, a portable supercomputer with 26.25 gigaflops peak performance, that cost less than $2,500 to construct, becoming the most cost-efficient supercomputer anywhere that Adams knows of. "It's small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk," said Brom. Instead of a bunch of researchers having to share a single Beowulf cluster supercomputer, now each researcher can have their own."

2 of 387 comments (clear)

  1. **Lets chop that price down...the newegg,com way** by Bananatree3 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Motherboard: MSI K9N6PGM-F MicroATX $62.99 * 4 = $251.96

    CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ AM2 CPU $67.50 * 4 = $270

    Main Memory: Kingston DDR2-667 1GByte RAM $48.49 * 8 + $4.99sh = $392.91

    Power Supply: (can't beat price): $76.00

    Network adapter (node to switch): (cant beat their price) $164.00

    Network adapter (switch to node): (cant beat their price) $15

    Switch: Trendware TEG-S80TXE 8-port Gigabit Ethernet Switch $46.99+$7.04sh = $54.03

    Hard drive: Seagate 7200 250GB SATA hard drive $69.99

    DVD/CD drive: (can't beat their price): $19

    Cooling: (can't beat their price): $32

    Fan protective grills: (can't beat their price): $10

    KVM: (can't beat their price): $50 Grand total (incl. 15 in hardware): 1416.89 $1000 saved by using Newegg!

  2. Re:Actually... Microwulf might well be revolutiona by forkazoo · · Score: 5, Informative

    One of the problems with supercomputers is that there aren't really very many of them, because of the size and cost. It means that the tools you use to run your supercomputing applications are similarly unusual. The skills to use and develop on parallel systems are then equally scarce. Access to a supercomputer isn't exactly common.


    Revolutionary? Everything old is new again...

    http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/
    http://news.taborcommunications.com/msgget.jsp?mid =494184&xsl=story.xsl -- 8 way parallel cluster that fits on an airplane for under 3 grand
    http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/ -- a 7U chassis that holds 14 blades, and is a bit spendy, but not completely unreasonable for some situations
    http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8177 -- My personal favorite, this page talks about several small portable miniclusters that have been made over the last six or seven years...

    Yes, 8 cores of Athlon64 is faster than 8 cores of low power VIA CPU's from several years ago, but the concept isn't revolutionary, and there isn't a lot of headline worthy engineering that goes into a project like this... I'm sure it's a very handy tool, and I'm not suggested it shouldn't have been built, or that it was entirely trivial to build, but in the end, it's just four ordinary motherboards and ethernet.