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.
(full article CBC News)

[Now if someone could sneak a copy of seti@home on there we'd be all set!] :-)