Anyone who has ever touched a computer a with 10-foot pole (or shorter) knows that the price of computational power falls fast. And this has once again been proven this weekend by a grad student and professor from Calvin College: together, they built a desktop sized supercomputer from off-the-shelf parts, for just under $2,500.

The design is somewhat reminsecent of a clubhouse sandwich:

The supercomputer's name is Microwulf. It is a variety of 'Beowulf cluster.' Cluster meaning a networked computers running in parallel; and Beowul denoting a cluster that is a "homemade, cost-effective" solution that "liberates researchers from expensive commercial options for super-computing, much like Beowulf of the Old English poem liberated the Danes from the tyrannical rule of Grendel." 

The hardware involved includes four MSI K6N6PGM-F motherboards, four Athlon 64 X2 3800+ AM2 CPUs, 8 sticks of Kingston DDR2-667 RAM, four PCI-E Intel network adaptors, and some Zalman case fans and a single 250 GB Seagate SATA HD. 

As for the software: They chose open-source distro-darling, Ubuntu Linux.   

For a price-tag of $2,470 USD, the Microwulf's performance is rated at 26.25 Gflops ( [10^9] floating-point-operations-per-second). In comparison, only 10 years ago, IBM's chess Grand Master-squashing Deep Blue supercomputer was built, at a cost of somewhere around the neighborhood of $5 million dollars, and its performance was rated at 11.38 Gflops.