Desktop supercomputer breaks $100 per Gflop

MICROWULF is the name of a Beowulf cluster supercomputer that's small enough to fit on a desktop, has over twice the raw computing power of the IBM Deep Blue system that beat Gary Kasparov at chess, and cost less than $100 per Gflop to build.

Built for $2,470 by then student Tim Brom '07 and computer science professor Joel Adams at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Microwulf has been measured running at a speed of 26.25 Gflops, or 2,625 million double-precision floating point operations per second.

That works out to a price/performance ratio of $94.10 per Gflop, or less than $0.10 per Mflop. By way of contrast, the least expensive large-scale supercomputers that have been built recently cost almost five times as much per Gflop.

Microwulf consumes 450 watts running full out under load, for a power/performance ratio of 17.14 watts per Gflop, or almost twice the power efficiency of the least power hungry large-scale supercomputers.

The system hardware manifest includes four Echo Star 325W MicroATX power supplies, four MSI K9N6PGM-F MicroATX motherboards, four AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ AM2 dual core processors, 8GB of Kingston DDR2-667 RAM, 1 Trendware TEG-S80TXE 8-port Gigabit Ethernet Switch, four Intel PRO/1000 PT PCI-Express NICs for beowulf node interconnects, one Intel PRO/100 S PCI NIC for external access, one Seagate 7200 250GB SATA hard drive, one Liteon SHD-16S1S 16X DVD/CD drive, and 4 Zalman ZM-F3 120mm case fans, plus miscellanous case hardware and fasteners.

At 11" X 12" X 17" in size, it's small enough to sit on a desktop or pack in a suitcase. That's handy, because Professor Adams plans to take Microwulf out on the road for demonstrations in middle school and high school science classrooms to interest young students in computer science. µ

L'INQ
Calvin College