University students in Virginia have put together a cheap supercomputer using off-the-shelf G5 Power Macintosh computers. The 1,100 computers are stacked on cooled metal racks at Virginia Tech. Students assembled the computer in a few weeks at a cost of $7 million US – much less than research supercomputers used for weather simulations. The students call it "Big Mac," and it's ranked as the world's third-fastest supercomputer, at 10.3 trillion operations per second. Computer scientists compile the annual list of the top 500 supercomputers, which will be released on Nov. 17.
Third fastest, eh? I'll bet the whole thing cost them a lot less than a "real" super-computer of equal power. Still, the thing did cost 7 mil... That school must have one heckuva tuition! And with 1,100 "nodes", the thing must dim the lights all over campus when it's running. $7,000,000/1,100=$6363.63 per node.
for that kind of money couldn't have they used cheaper priced pc hardware, and gone with linux? I bet they could have doubled the number of nodes, or close to it!