Adventures in Building the World's Most Affordable Supercomputer
Joel Adams and Tim Brom
Minds in the Making
August 2007

When Professor Joel Adams and then-student Tim Brom '07 set out to build a supercomputer, they had it in mind to create a machine that would be both portable and affordable. Within months of beginning their work by purchasing materials for the supercomputer, they were running tests to measure the performance of their completed product, Microwulf.

Microwulf has been measured to process 26.25 gigaflops, or 26.25 billion double-precision floating point instructions, per second. It achieves this performance by relying on four dual-core motherboards connected by an 8-port Gigabyt Ethernet switch. The connected components form a three-tiered system that looks like a triple-decker sandwich.

Microwulf is considered a Beowulf cluster, a group of networked computers that run open source software and work in parallel to solve a single problem. Beowulf clusters are so named because their homemade, cost-effective nature liberates researchers from expensive commercial options for super-computing, much like Beowulf of the Old English poem liberated the Danes from the tyrannical rule of Grendel.

Though a relatively small supercomputer (truly huge machines, like that used by the National Weather Service, are hundreds of times faster), Microwulf is perhaps the least expensive supercomputing machine on the planet.

Adams and Brom's work has been recognized on several major technology-related Web sites, including Slashdot, Digg and Wired Blog Network.

READ ABOUT MICROWULF ON JOEL ADAMS' WEB SITE »

READ A TECHNICAL PAPER ABOUT MICROWULF »

READ A CALVIN NEWS RELEASE ABOUT MICROWULF »