He just wanted a fast computer for his scientific calculations. But like it or not, Warren and his colleagues have become the poster children for a revolution, as scientists who use supercomputers seize control by building their machines themselves. Power of parallelism' You could think of Avalon and computers like it as throwbacks to a more-romantic era. They ate junk food and coaxed that last ounce of performance out of their machines. I was there.
Parallelism is nothing new in supercomputing.
Big companies like Intel have been building supercomputers for years that use a whole bunch of processors, allowing a scientist to tackle a problem by dividing a big calculation into a bunch of smaller pieces. Beowulfs take that idea one step further. As personal computers got faster and cheaper, Sterling reasoned that the lowest-cost way of doing supercomputing was to simply stack up a bunch of PCs and wire them together. The technical details are slightly more daunting, involving intricacies of computer networks needed to get the stacks of PCs talking to one another. Warren said he had had the idea of building this sort of a computer since he was an undergrad at Caltech in the 1980s.