Professor builds 6th fastest supercomputer for only $1256 (if we lived in 1993)

September 5, 2007 in Cool, Hardware

Professor Joel Adams and his student Tim Brom have built a personal, portable Beowulf cluster, named Microwulf, which (if we lived in 1993) would be the 6th fastest computer on the planet. Maybe that doesn’t impress you? But when you put it into comparision it is a starling acheivement.

In Nov. 1993, when Microwulf would have been in 6th place, the 5th place machine was a Thinking Machines CM-5/512 with 512 CPUs. Do the maths, 512 CPUs 14 years ago equals 4 CPUS today, a factor of 64!

If we lived in 1996, Microwulf would have been in 60th place, the next machine on the list is a Cray T3D MC256-8 with 256 CPUs, that machine would have cost millions of dollars.

Hats of to the prof.