[RayChuang88]

What's interesting is that the idea of building a supercomputer on the cheap by running a whole bunch of identical PC-class machines in massively parallel fashion has been around for many years. Remember the Beowulf clustering project for Linux-based computers? I knew one biotech company clustered 1,000 identical small tower PC machines running Intel Pentium III 800 MHz CPU's using Beowulf clustering software and was able to achieve supercomputer-like results for DNA research; today, with "blade" server machines, 1,000 identical CPU's could be clustered together in a room about the size of the living room of most family sized houses--and the CPU's will all be quad-core Intel Xeon processors.

[SunkenCiv]

The best part of that idea was that the CPUs in a lot of these projects were considered obsolete, but in any case (heh) had been superseded and would have otherwise been disposed of somewhere. :’)