Cash-strapped students hungrily eye up old, unloved racks

Use a stack of old Dell computers

Plenty of Core 2 Duo Dell computers available on ebay for under £70 each - 16 of those plus gigabit network cards, a 16 port gigabit switch and a monitor should make for a reasonable cluster (and just stay inside the power budget).

Shame that the Parallela isn't currently shipping

$2500 would have bought you 16 nodes (and change), each with 16 CPUs and with a peak performance of 512GFLOPS. All that on only a couple of hundred watts total also.

I'd definitely go used.

There is so much used gear that can be had for cheap or free. I have an 16 blade (8 blades are populated)c7000 Blade chassis a former employer was throwing in the garbage and gave to me for nothing. 104 AMD 2.5Ghz Cores and 640GB Memory and I still have all the money. I have it running in the basement on 2 115v 30A Circuits but it can easily run on one. I have 32TB of equallogic storage and a 12TB EMC courtesy of the same former employer.

Dont forget the OS licensing costs

ha ha ha.

Only joking.

"There's a company over in Hong Kong selling quad-CPU (AMD Opteron 8356) boxes.for under $1500. 16 cores, 2.3GHz, 16GB with a 500GB drive."

The rules do require at least a 2 nodes, so you'd have to shave something off the specs there to get it down to $1250 a unit. But yes 8-)

I think there's three possible strategies...

1) Heavy reliance on GPUs. These may be slow for a few benchmarks (if money is spent on GPUs instead of CPUs) but would heavily accelerate others. Regarding the compiler, gcc does support autoparallelization (for Intel chips, using MMX/SSE/SSE2/SSE3/etc. instructions to speed up vector operations pretty much)... If any project supports turning these into GPGPU code instead (for NVidia CUDA or the like), they could find boards with maximum number of PCIe slots, shove some cards in and clean up. They will want to carefully select a card, since power use and cost both drop like a rock as you go from "top of the line" to "pretty damned fast".

2) ARMs? Someone may lay out a large number of ARM cores. ARMs plus GPUs would be particularly interesting.

3) Used hardware. They can get some rack mount Xeon systems or whatever, balancing out cost versus the power usage cap (and possibly space depending on if the systems are 1U or what..)

Time to make some phone calls

I just bought a quad Xeon with 8Gb of RAM off the boss at work for £75 (upgrading my old 32 bit server to 64 bit). Given that these guys are far deeper into the industry than me and therefore are much more likely to know people they can purchase ex-refresh equipment from on the very cheap, I can see some surprisingly good configurations popping up!

Workstation Bargains!!

Loads of XW6600 and T5500s around Ebay right now, brilliant kit for £200!!!

I am just configging(?!? new word?) one with dual X55xx xeons and 16Gb of ram for a customer who is getting this for the price of a bland pc from the shops!

To use a motoring analogy, why buy a new super-mini when you can have a two year old XKR?

plus!- just found this one still has a year of 24/7 warranty remaining!!! now where are those six SSDs???