<rant>

Now this story on CNET got me. Get a bunch of PC's and laptops from computer enthusiasts, jam them all in a gym for a day and build a supercomputer to rival the Top 500 in the world. Gees guys, I don't think so.

Just ask anyone on the Top 500 list, including our famous Windows cluster at the Cornell Theory Center, and you'll soon discover that you can't just simply plonk indiscriminate compute nodes together with a bit of UTP and, bam!, there's a supercomputer. To be fair though, it is possible to join workstations together in a lab, using something like our HPC toolkit; at least they typically have consistent hardware, and a controlled software environment.

But I just love some of the quotes in the story; I could see these coming. "If we had twice as many machines and another two days, I think we would have been successful”. Just love it! Or this one, "Unfortunately, a successful speed run kept eluding the group during the day as some volunteered computers proved unreliable.”. Really, you don't say.

An excellent social exercise that I sure would have liked to see, and kudos to the team involved, but you really can't ignore the classic disciplines of computing in order to get results; you know, controlled hardware and software environments etc.. etc..

</rant>