Name That Supercomputer

By Doug Barney

Need $500 to pay the rent (or your bookie) or just want your name to be remembered by hardware geeks everywhere? Then the A. James Clark School of Engineering (College Park, MD), part of the University of Maryland, has a contest for you.

The school recently invented a desktop supercomputer (NVIDIA has a similar plan that we covered here,

Now let’s talk about the computer itself. Where NVIDIA proposes a desktop supercomputer using one or more of its Telsa graphics processors (which themselves contain some 128 parallel processors), the Clark machine stitches together 64 parallel processors, which are carefully coaxed into working together as if it were a single chip.

And the Clark team clearly aims this at desktop-style applications.

The system, like NVIDIA, is designed to work alongside the personal computer and its OS. In fact, Clark researchers claim the system will even speed the operation of Macintosh computers, as well as Linux and Windows.

For the down and dirty details, click

Subscribe to our FREE magazine,
FREE email newsletters or both!

Join over 90,000 engineering professionals who get fresh engineering news as soon as it is published.

  Join Now