You can build a mainframe from the things you find at home

[mdlbear]

Budget supercomputer - $2,500 for 26 gigaflops | Science Blog

In January of 2007, they began to piece together their system and by March, they were running tests to see just what Microwulf could do. In the end, the project came in under budget with Microwulf donning a price-tag of just $2470. With current hardware prices, another system like Microwulf would cost half of what it cost Adams and Brom to build earlier this year.

(Via wcg; Calvin College press release here; project website here.)

The system is using four microATX motherboards with AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ AM2 CPUs -- I could go down to Fry's and build one tonight if I wanted to risk the flower_cat's wrath. Or I could wait until my kids' new computers arrive, bring home my work laptop, and fire up my workstation. I'm already wired for GigE.

(Extra points to the first person who can explain why the userpic is appropriate.)

Comments

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

Ask Big Harold. He'd probably help you. :D
And your icon is some old computer with meters. Heck if I know, short of cheating and looking at your user icons. (which I did, so I'm not telling what it is cause I cheated). 0:)

[snobahr.livejournal.com]

How sad is it that my second question is, "But will it run World of Warcraft?"

My first question was, "Which early computer is that?" followed by, "Oh, is that Univac?"

[mdlbear]

Not Univac.

[hms42]

Well... Its not a "Do it Yourself" machine... (No cotten, linens or wash and wear on it) :)

Not a pascal or babbage engine...

hmm... I might as well go with a Frank Hayes reference... S100 bus... (No wait, that's the interface.)

How about an IBM mainframe from the 50s. Does it have a tape drive or was it Hollerith card?

Harold S.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Would you believe this one could have either a punch/reader or a paper tape drive, plus a four-tape, 1.2 million-word tape drive bank?

I'm frankly impressed.

And you're spot on with the year, but way off with the manufacturer.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Oh, jeez, so Moore's Law works for gigafloppage in addition to petabytage? Not too long ago I figured you could hook up a batch of 1-U servers and call it a Beowulf Super for... $50k. Now it's $2.5k? woof.

Of course, I remember when we had 300 baud.... and liked it.

But, yes, I *missed* punch cards, and frankly, I'm just as happy that way.

*cheats and looks up what your icon is* *cheats again and reads Wikipedia*

*LOL* Yep, I get the joke. 'sfunny. Sixty grand in 1958 dollars... and now folks pay a couple of benjamins. And they can walk out with it under their arms, and plug it in themselves, rather than having a professional installation done in a dedicated room with a dinosaur floor.

Man, oh, man. And nevermind getting the darn thing to think fast enough to make the onramp to the Infobahn....

And the abacus, only a toy!
When Iiiiiiiiiiiii, was a boy...

[mdlbear]

"couple of benjamins" -- not even close.

1K words * 21 bits, and a serial ALU. I've used a bigger and faster processor in an alarm clock 30 years ago.

The console was a Flexowriter. I think you could get a card reader/punch for it; I know there was a mag tape drive.