Up until now supercomputers have been big racks full of servers, this Calvin College student and a Professor duo have created an portable, inexpensive supercomputer capable of crunching gigantic chunks of data from anywhere. Microwulf has been measured to process 26.25 gigaflops (26.25 billion double-precision floating point instructions) per second. This performance is archived by clustering four Dual-Core motherboard connected by an 8-port Gigabit Ethernet switch. All the components are mounted in a triple deck layout that looks like a big sandwich.

With the price of dual core components going down Adams asked his academic department to provide $2500 for his project. In January of 2007, they began to piece together the supercomputer and by March they had begun testing. The total cost to build Microwulf was $2470 not a bad price to performance ratio. With current hardware prices, another system like Microwulf could be built for about half of what it cost Adams to build earlier this year.

[Via Calvin]