Yes, this was a monumental waste of good hardware and the average enthusiast will never have access to the resources necessary to pull something like this off, but the end result is so cool you just have to check this out. Matt Tovey is an HPC and Storage IT specialist currently living near Munich, Germany. He recently worked on a project where he had to replace literally hundreds of Itanium processors to build a large super-computer. Instead of discarding the old processors, as was the original plan, he instead built a custom desk and tiled it with the CPUs...
"In March 2007, a project to upgrade one of our customer's computers began. The upgrade took several weeks, with dozens of people working around the clock, resulting one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. But that is another story.
Along the way several hundred Itanium CPUs, in perfect working order, were going to be scrapped. I figured I could find a better end for them than the scrap-yard, and having seen Windell's computer chip trivet article thought I'd see if I couldn't improve my desktop by tiling it with the old CPUs."
We don't even want to think about how much all of those processors cost when they were originally purchased. The guy could have a million dollars worth of hardware sitting under that mouse.
Marco Chiappetta
Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com
