Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have built an improvised distributed supercomputer entirely out of discarded computers from federal facilities and donations from the public.
Dubbed the Stone SouperComputer, it was named in homage to the “Tale of Stone Soup,” the story of a traveler who tricked a town’s selfish residents into donating the individual ingredients to make a delicious meal for all. The moral is that when everybody works together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts — like the SouperComputer.
At press time the cluster consisted of 132 computers, 52 of which were Intel Pentium-class with the rest mostly Intel 486/66 boxes. The machines run Red Hat Linux and the Beowulf Linux clustering software, and they have been put to work on a number of research projects ranging from weather simulations to predicting the effects of environmental change on plants.
