Students build super cheap supercomputer

A US university claims it has built the world's least expensive supercomputer by clustering together 64 AMD Athlon chips. It is also the first time Athlons have been clustered into such a computer.

A US university claims it has built the world's least expensive supercomputer by clustering together 64 AMD Athlon chips. It is also the first time Athlons have been clustered into such a computer.

The University of Kentucky has constructed a parallel supercomputer that achieves application performance of more than one billion floating point operations per second (one gigaflop) for every $650 (£406) spent on building it.Klat2 (Kentucky Linux Athlon Testbed 2) is built on the Beowulf model of constructing supercomputers by clustering commodity PC components that are interconnected by a high-speed network. Beowulfs run Linux and other free software.

The university said that AMD's 3DNow 32bit vector floating point allows Klat2's 64 700Mhz Athlons to achieve more than 64 gigaflops while solving a system of 40,960 equations. It claims this is the 150th fastest supercomputer in the world.

Today's supercomputers usually cost around $10,000 (£6,250) per gigaflop.

Other Beowulfs have brought that cost down to about $3,000 (£1,875). The cost of building Klat2 was $41,000 (£25,652), excluding labour but including pizza and soda for 30 student volunteers, which works out at $650 per gigaflop. AMD donated the Athlon chips, which in total cost $13,000 (£8,125).