Want a supercomputer for about the price of a mini?

Take a look at what scientists at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois have done.

Researchers there have taken 100 Sony PlayStation 2 (PS2) systems (70 active units and 30 in reserve) and Sony Corp.'s Linux Kit for PS2, added some message passing interface and cluster scheduling software, and created a system they claim can deliver potentially up to half a teraFLOP of performance (i.e., a system capable of 500 billion floating-point operations per second).

Total cost of the system is about US$50,000.

The system is experimental at this time. And to take advantage of such processing power, scientific applications would need to be ported and optimized to run on the system.

Still, the group feels that given the processing power in many off-the-shelf graphics systems, their approach may offer a low-cost alternative for scientific computing in the future.