In 2006, I spent some time on this blog "Building the Perfect Beast" Amanda, my AMD dual core gaming machine. I'm very happy with her. Amanda's days are filled owning noobs in Counterstrike, Video editting, and burning DVDs. Time for a new project! This year I'm going to build a supercomputer. This is something every mad scientist, evil-genius, arch-villian, or astrophysicist wants.

In a way this is really a moot point. Maxine, my 2 GHZ G4 MACINTOSH cranks out a 2 Gigaflops (2 billion floating point operations per second) without braking a sweat. The first Cray supercomputer (Cray-1) only did 136 Megaflops (millions of operations). The current line of Crays, the Cray-XT3, does 42 Teraflops or trillions of operation per seconds. If I can get 10 Gigaflops I'll be happy. I can finally start doing that weapon research I've been putting off.

I'm going to try to do this under $200. Actually, it not that hard, but I think the High Priestess will freak once I get started. Well, all I have to say it's better than spending my money on Jello-Porn.

What the secret behind a $200 supercomputer? Massive parallel processing. By linking several computers together I can get them to work on the same problem and reach an answer much faster. This is not a new idea: Prof. Frank Mueller turned 8 Playstations 3 into a supercomputer, and University of Southern California getting 233 Gigaflops with 74 G4.

Yeah, It's a total Geek thing.