26.25 Gigaflop supercomputer in a breadbox

[Philip Miller Tate]

Nice. Remember the days when 'Byte" magazine had DIY hardware  
articles, and they published their 'supercomputer' design? It was an  
outboard processor dedicated to the rapid calculation of Mandelbrot  
sets, when they were all the rage.

My PC laptop often sits on my desk unattended. It's not doing any  
background work for me; the screen saver has kicked in and the screen  
is blank; all the power-saving options are active; it's not  
networked; and suddenly the HDD activity LED goes nuts for several  
minutes at a time. I can only assume that it has reached the level of  
rudimentary intelligence and is playing or dreaming. When disturbed,  
it yawns and struggles to wakefulness as Joe has described. My iBook,  
on the other hand, leaps into action almost instantaneously like an  
excited puppy. However, it has no HDD LED, so I have no idea what or  
when it is thinking to itself.

Phil M1GWZ



On 6 Sep 2007, at 02:48, Joseph Bento wrote:

> Of course if you load Windows Vista on that marvellous machine, it  
> would
> slow to a crawl.
>
> Have you ever wondered just what Windows is doing on a machine that  
> stays
> powered up?  (Phoning home? entertaining itself? Uploading all your  
> secrets
> to the CIA?) You can wake the machine up, the display crawls to  
> life like a
> slow-scan TV presentation, and the HD continues to whirl for the  
> next 15
> minutes, essentially making the machine useless in the interim.   
> This all
> seems regardless of how much RAM or processor speed.
>
> 73,
> Joe, N6DGY
> Pleasant Grove, Utah
>
>
>
> On 9/5/07 2:26 PM, "Andre Kesteloot" <andre.kesteloot at verizon.net>  
> wrote:
>
>> Thanks to Richard O'Neil for bringing this to our attention
>> 73
>> André
>>
>> http://www.ohgizmo.com/2007/09/03/1256-microwulf-supercomputer- 
>> smaller-than-br
>> ead-box-runs-at-2625-gigaflops/
>>
>>
>>
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