Green Supercomputing in a Desktop Box

The advent of the Beowulf cluster in 1994 provided dedicated compute cycles, i.e., supercomputing for the masses, as a cost-effective alternative to large supercomputers, i.e., supercomputing for the few. However, as the cluster movement matured, these clusters became like their large-scale supercomputing brethren - a shared (and power-hungry) datacenter resource that must reside in a actively-cooled machine room in order to operate properly. The above observation, coupled with the increasing performance gap between the PC and supercomputer, provides the motivation for a "Green Supercomputer" in a desktop box.