Twitter engineer builds supercomputer in his spare time for fun!

Brian Guarraci is a software engineer,works at Twitter and in his spare time he builts supercomputers with a design that was inspired by two of the most iconic supercomputers ever made.

"I like my tweets how I like my computers... Fast," says his Twitter bio.
Guarraci built a supercomputer that manages to hit 208 gigaflop speeds at peak performance! That's more than 17 times faster than commercially available processors.

The Parallac

You may have heard about the Parallella Kickstarter project that was supposed to "make parallel computing accessible to everyone" with its cheap $99 boards. Guarraci used eight Parallella boards to perform fast computation.
Along with those he used two Intel NUCs (next unit of computing) devices with third-generation Intel Core i3 processor, with 16 gigabytes of RAM and 120 gigabytes of SSD each.
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The setup cost about $2,500 for the Unit, including roughly $800 for the Parallella boards, $1,000 for the NUCs, and $120 for the switch, power, case,etc.
The Design of the supercomputer was inspired by the famous 1976 Cray 1 supercomputer and the Connection Machine supercomputers of the 1980s, as well as the new cylindrical Mac Pro.
He's calling the machine the 'Parallac'.

'Parallel computing' runs processes simultaneously in order to perform tasks faster, is important because processors aren't getting much faster, Guarraci says.
"One of the things that’s cool about a Parallella cluster is that you can perform multiple heterogenous parallel-computing tasks all at the same time. Some nodes can be doing image processing while other nodes are doing machine learning. It’s a very flexible setup."

You could make a supercomputer yourself and brag about having one! Parallella boards makes it easy..Time, Dedication & Money are all that you need.

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