Sep 10 2007Supercomputer Does 26 Gigaflops, Is Cheap
Tim Brom of Calvin College built the Microwulf Supercomputer, that flips 26 gigaflops (26 billion double-precision floating point instructions per second) and cost $2,500 to build last year (and would only cost $1,256 to build today).
It consists of four microATX motherboards, each with a dual core CPU and 2 gigs of ram, all connected with an 8-port Gigabit Ethernet switch. The whole shebang also includes a CD/DVD drive and a 250 gb HD, and runs Ubuntu Linux.
I want one. Maybe in a slightly cooler case (like this), and with some, uh, dust protection (like this), and I'd be good to go. Ten points to Tim for the sweet computer, but minus two for having his Matrix poster rolled up in the corner.
One more design picture after the jump.
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Reader Comments
1. clark - September 10, 2007 4:13 PM
FIRST YES!
2. FIRST - September 10, 2007 4:13 PM
Seriously, that looks like Tiger Direct puked into my closet... But it's pretty cool. Try a case mod to make it not look lame.
3. yourmum - September 10, 2007 5:00 PM
Awesome, should have submerged the whole thing in a big tank of no conductive cooling oil, with plastic fish of course! and maybe one of those little castles for the fish to swim around AND A TREASURE CHEST! That would be the proverbial "OWNAGE!!!ONEONESHIFT+1!"
4. NIN - September 10, 2007 5:01 PM
So he built a computer cluster.... whats so new about it?
26gflops? My Xbox 360 does 1 teraflop
5. meppers - September 10, 2007 5:01 PM
gigaflops?
6. jonathan - September 10, 2007 10:10 PM
nobody makes the first jump.
7. matt - September 11, 2007 1:34 AM
this doesn't make any sense, i have a 2900xt and acording to this website http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/431/3
my card alone does somethin roun 475 gigaflops. so i can probably expect up words of a terraflop.
8. Ace - September 11, 2007 3:01 AM
Nice MSPaint illustration.
9. AudioGeek - September 11, 2007 6:27 AM
some day, this will all fit onto the head of a pin... and it will hold a note to my shirt.
10. Nick - September 11, 2007 7:14 AM
In response to the XBox and GPU comments
Not all flops are equal.
His calculations are using double-precision numbers to IEEE specifications. Your numbers are probably for single-precision and not IEEE because you don't care if your pixel is slightly the wrong colour. This makes a big difference.
His CPU has an instruction set which can carry out any general purpose calculation. Your GPU just does multiply-add and so the silicon is much simpler and therefore faster.
His numbers are from a real-world benchmark running a parallel application across all the cores:
http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/performance/
Your numbers are marketing numbers based on theoretical peak performance.
11. Zeon - September 11, 2007 7:31 AM
uh......................what????
12. RQ - September 11, 2007 11:54 AM
A cluster made of 4 computers ?
OMG THAT AMAZING !! HOW THE HELL DID THEY MANAGED TO DO THAT UNBELIVABLE THING ??
13. Michael Brown - September 13, 2007 5:05 PM
does it make my porn stream in faster?
14. Walter - September 14, 2007 6:00 PM
Yeah, but can it run Windows?
15. Raz'Griz - September 28, 2007 9:39 AM
Umm...................... Can We put a lazier on it?