Supercomputer made from bits

Forget millions of pounds worth of heavily customised supercomputing kit, weighing more than 30 elephants and filling two football pitches.

France's National Institute for Research in Computer Science has put together a supercomputer from off-the-shelf parts. And it has benchmarked its way onto the top 500 list of most powerful computers in the world.

Working with HP, INRIA Rhone-Alps managed to put together a supercomputing cluster from 225 off-the-shelf e-PCs, running Mandrake Linux.

The resulting I-Cluster is made from default configurations and standard networking hardware. It's also capable of providing enough power to get it onto the supercomputer rich list, coming in as the 385th most powerful supercomputer.

All in all, the beast cost $210,000 to build, a far cry from IBM's $110m ASCI White supercomputer currently hogging the number one slot.

And the machines themselves are not exactly top of the range, each offering a 733Mhz Pentium III processor with 256Mb of RAM and a 15Gb hard drive.

But researchers say the model also shows how unused bandwidth on a corporate network could be used in a similar way, effectively bringing supercomputers to the standard corporate environment.