[mdlug] Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone by Adapteva — Kickstarter

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Fri, 2012-10-12 at 12:59 -0400, Aaron Kulkis wrote:
> Dan Pritts wrote:
> > On Oct 12, 2012, at 10:54 AM, Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:
> >>> Can they do it at 5W of power consumption?
> >> Nope.  But you are moving the mileposts.   I don't care a whit about
> >> power consumption.
> > You would if you were buying a supercomputer.  Ever look at a data center's power bill?
> Precisely.  Not just the bill for moving electrons inside the CPU,
> but also the power bill for the air conditioning to remove the heat
> generated by the electrons moving inside the CPU.
> I used to joke that I was going to buy a VAX-11 (40 Amps of
> 240 V tri-phase -- think electric clothes dryer) so I could
> be the only person in the neighborhood who could run 4.3 BSD
> on his furnace.

We had an ALR Revolution 6x6 which had 6x Pentium Pros [and a really
cool LCD display on the front for monitoring the fan speeds].  I was
tempted to bring that home and duct it in my basement.   But the
firmware was really weird and I didn't want a furnace running NT 3.51.