Hum,
check out the `
Space Simulator` ; a 294-node Beowulf cluster with theoretical peak performance just below 1.5 teraflops, (trillions of floating point operations per second).
Each processing node looks much like a collection of boring bog-standard computers you would find at PCWorld; consisting of a Pentium 4 processor, 1 gigabyte of 333 MHz SDRAM, an 80 gigabyte hard drive and a gigabit Ethernet card. Each individual node cost less than $1,000 and the entire system cost under $500,000.
The Space Simulator has been used almost continuously for theoretical astrophysics simulations since it was built, and has spent much of the past year calculating the evolution of the Universe. The first results of that work were recently presented at a research conference in Italy .
In addition to simulating the structure and evolution of the Universe, the Space Simulator has been used to study the explosions of massive stars and to help understand the X-ray emission from the centre of our galaxy, and no doubt playing
Quake.
(as if that would help them)
More info here...[well , i thought it looked cool]
