Student and Professor Build Budget Supercomputer
@ 2007/08/31This past winter Calvin College professor Joel Adams and then Calvin senior Tim Brom built Microwulf, a portable supercomputer with 26.25 gigaflops peak performance, that cost less than $2,500 to construct, becoming the most cost-efficient supercomputer anywhere that Adams knows of. "It's small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk," said Brom. Instead of a bunch of researchers having to share a single Beowulf cluster supercomputer, now each researcher can have their own.
Now imagine what 4-core, 4GB, 4Gbit ethernet per cluster would cost... Q6600 is not a viable option without major costs in networking hardware.
Interesting that they did not choose dual 1Gbit boards over buying 1GBit Ethernet cards though, would have saved some cash there.
Edit: Cost of their exact Beowulf cluster costs $1,281 today, with a DDR2-800Mhz mem upgrade at that. Didn't mess with the networking but total cost could probably be dropped further to about the $1,000 mark.