The geeks at the University of Antwerp’s Vision Lab have put together a desktop supercomputer for right around €6000. It utilizes 13 GPU’s, a little Linux, and a custom BIOS.

From the FASTRAII website:

Although the system is up and running, we are still experiencing software stability issues, probably caused by an incompatibility between the video drivers and the BIOS and Linux modifications we had to use. Check out the blog for more details on the current status of FASTRA II.

The FASTRA II design contains six NVIDIA GTX295 dual-GPU cards, and one GTX275 single-GPU card. To fit all this hardware in a single PC case, a special cage was designed for the graphics cards, which are connected to the motherboard by flexible riser cables. To satisfy all 13 GPUs, The system has four power supplies. At full speed, it can outperform a moderately sized cluster of state-of-the-art CPUs.

This is a desktop clocking twelve teraflops. In comparison the Jaguar, in Oak Ridge TN, does 50 teraflops. Not bad for a couple of geeks and a desktop. Check out the videos, there’s some cool shit here.

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