Matt's awesome chip desk
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| What does one do 434 discarded Itanium CPUs? Matt Tovey was inspired by our Chip Trivet, and used them to make this awesome computer desk. | |
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The CPU modules were scrapped as the result of a supercomputer upgrade, and were presumably functional before having their heat sinks taken off-- a herculean effort for that many CPUs! Matt says that the list price for the lot of chips was over US$800,000 in 2006 and that the desk contains about 2.8 TFLOPs of computing power, about the same
as 900 3.2GHz P4s.
Matt started with a plain desk, tiled in the CPUs, and added wooden edging and a beveled glass top. Nice work!
I just love the way that this desk looks. But it gives me an idea too-- take it one step further, and what if it worked? You could use a single, giant PCB for the motherboard which sat underneath the glass surface of the desk. With that much area, you could fit in a lot of processing power. On the cheap (or moderately cheap), one could imagine instead filling the inside of a desk top with low-cost (even last-generation) PC motherboards to make a great looking beowulf cluster or render farm that doesn't take up any desktop or rack-mount space.
Sadly, Matt's page has moved on to the great /dev/null in the sky, but the mirror still shows some of the build photos.
[Tags: make, diy, cpu, chip, supercomputing] | |
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