The Coral Project Vol. A growing number of laboratories are starting to use commodity supercomputers, built out of mass market parts. The motivation for this is easy to understand.
Mass market means low prices, so that more compute cycles can be purchased for less money.
For the price of a couple of workstations, one can get an entire cluster of PCs whose aggregate performance is an order of magnitude better. Larger clusters like Avalon and CPlant are now 113th and 97th on the list of the top 500 computers in the world. This approach to computing also allows one to configure a system matched to the kinds of problems that need to be solved. Local control over the entire system makes these clusters attractive even if the computer time on a large but remote supercomputer is competitively priced. Given the importance of economic factors, there is an incentive to identify which scientific and engineering problems can be efficiently solved on clusters of PCs.