A SiCortex SC648 supercomputer and a Linux cluster of 648 CPU’s and a TB of main memory woudl draw about 1,200 watts. That’s gotta widen your Carbon Footprint!Unless, of course, you are a bunch of crazy MIT students withe bicycles, and you’ve got generators attached to the bikes.<\/p>\n
A team of ten MIT students powered a supercomputer for twenty minutes by pedalling bicycles. They duly claimed the world record for human-powered computing (HPC)….An SC648 chip, with six processors on it, draws around 8 watts of power, which compares to a typical notebook computer CPU needing 100 watts, according to SiCortex CEO John Mucci. Other supercomputers draw tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of watts.The 10 cyclists pedalled their bikes, set on stands, with the wheels driving dynamos to generate direct current power which was converted into the alternating current needed. The supercomputer modelled a nuclear fusion reaction.A spokesperson said that the human-powered session produced more computations than took place in the first 3,000 years of civilization. He also said that more arithmetic calculations were computed than were done on the entire earth up to 1960.[source]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n