Supercomputer built from Playstation 2
 

Supercomputer assembled from Sony PlayStation 2.
http://news.com.com/2100-1043_3-1010037.html

The resulting system, with components purchased at retail prices, cost a little more than $50,000. Researchers at the supercomputing center believe the system may be capable of a half trillion operations a second, well within the definition of supercomputer, although it may not rank among the world's 500 fastest supercomputers.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the project, which uses the open-source Linux operating system, is that the only hardware engineering involved was placing 70 of the individual game machines in a rack and plugging them together with a high-speed Hewlett-Packard network switch. The center's scientists bought 100 machines but are holding 30 in reserve, possibly for high-resolution display application.
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Interesting project, running the next Google on racks of PS/2's

I read somewhere that building a supercomputer is considered an official threat to national security- like building a nuclear weapon.

I wonder what sort of crap you have to go through to register your beowulf.

Good to know that IBM is working to be #1 with a petaflop machine :)

http://news.com.com/2100-1008-1000421.html?tag=nl

So you say that my home cluster is against the USA security? LOL... If I knew that I would sell it to the arabs so I would get some $$$.

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

huh, interesting... i saw something very similar at the '00 Siggraph in New Orleans. in the Silicon graphics (SGI) booth, they had a floor-standing Origin 3500 (Onyx InfiniteReality2) that they had stripped all the graphics options from, and had it tied into a cubed box about 3' x 3' that was packed w/ 16 PS2 motherboards, all running simultaneously... this rig was pumping out a stream of realtime HD graphics (1920x1080, 1080p) all in 3D, not a static render and perfectly fluid... looks to be a similar application. i took some good digital pictures of that setup, i'll try to dig them out to post in this thread..

Actually, I didn't say that.

Do you know the definition of a supercomputer by today's standards?

Seems to me that you can just create one with freely available p2p processing software like greentea. Or a kazaa virus.