This project would be fun to do, but it's way out of my budget, so I'm hoping the hardware gods hear my wish :)

I wish upon:
24 x Radeon HD4870X2 or Nvidia 9800GX2 graphic cards
6 x MSI K9A2 V2 or better with double pci spacing
6 x AMD Phenom quad 9850, or better (16 core bulldozer would be nice :)
aloooot of memory
6 x 1500-2000w psu
Copper heat pipes
Aluminum 9 square meters/or large (3 square meter cooler)

One HD4870X2 card have just more 2 tflops and If I can get all 24 of them working together that would go in to the 40-50 tflops range.

nVidia have the Gelato renderer (was before BMRT), and I read that soon Mental ray will work on the nVidia GPU's.

On the ATI side there is the Render monkey and the Stream computing stuff from AMD. Could also use the maya hw render and play with different drivers, but I have no idea what'll work best. But I can't wait to try :)

For now I just made it in 3D, here's some pics. Would be cool making all sides of box large coolers so the computer would be quiet despite all that power.

Update 1.
Very happy!! I had a very nice talk with AMD, and they are going to send some hardware so I can start testing :)) Thank you!

Update 2.
New design of heatpipes (no pics yet). Have shortened them, and now all go UP :)

Update 3. Amd craped on me, and did't send anything other than mail with hot air. .. I guess I'm playing with CUDA now...

But I really hope OpenCL will be a standard so you can run anything on you graphiccards. CUDA is just for nvidia.

(Click image for bigger pic)

All internal fans removed and replaced with copper heat pipes.

All sides are large aluminum coolers

2 graphic cards to each side and CPU to the back cooler.

Copper strips run up and down to distribute heat evenly

Larger front fans for a windy box at low rpm = quite.

.. and some red lights.

50 tflops, easy :)

Cheers
Janne

Liked this? You gonna love this :)