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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/technolo...ogy/22SUPE.html<< SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 21 — A home-brew supercomputer, assembled from off-the-shelf personal computers in just one month at a cost of slightly more than $5 million, is about to be ranked as one of the fastest machines in the world.
Word of the low-cost supercomputer, put together by faculty, technicians and students at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, is shaking up the esoteric world of high performance computing, where the fastest machines have traditionally cost from $100 million to $250 million and taken several years to build . . .
. . . The official results for the ranking will not be reported until next month at a supercomputer industry event. But the Apple-based supercomputer, which is powered by 2,200 I.B.M. microprocessors, was able to compute at 7.41 trillion operations a second, a speed surpassed by only three other ultra-fast computers . . .
. . . Officials at the school said that they were still finalizing their results and that the final speed number might be significantly higher. >>>
