“It’s not moonshine, but Linux that’s fueling a University
of Kentucky parallel supercomputer whose creators claim it has
demonstrated performance exceeding 1 billion floating point
operations per second (GFLOPS) for every $650 spent on building the
machine.”
“The approach used to design and build this machine makes it
cost-effective for solving a wide range of problems, from drug
design using computational chemistry to design of quieter printers
using computational fluid dynamics (CFD),” said University
professor Hank Dietz about the machine named KLAT2 for short. Its
birth certificate officially reads: Kentucky Linux Athlon Testbed
2.”
“According to Dietz, you don’t always get what you paid for. “To
function as a supercomputer, the PCs within a cluster need to be
interconnected by a high-performance network. Instead of expensive
gigabit network hardware, KLAT2’s network uses lots of cheap
100Mb/s Ethernet hardware in a new configuration called a `Flat
Neighborhood’ network.”