Network World - Bruce Allen is perhaps the world's best do-it-yourselfer. When he needed a supercomputer to crunch the results of gravitational-wave research, he built one with his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
That was in 1998, and since then he's built three more supercomputers, all in pursuit of actually observing gravitational waves, which theoretically emanate from black holes orbiting each other and from exploding stars but have never been directly observed.
His most recent supercomputer, a cluster of 1,680 machines with four cores each, is in Hanover, Germany. Essentially, it's a 6,720-core processor that in the months after it was built was ranked No. 58 in the world. "We filled our last row of racks recently, and we're No. 79 on the current Top500 list," says Allen, director of the Max Planck Institute.
He builds his own for several reasons, one of which is that he thinks he gets more for his money when he does the work himself.
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