Generally, a supercomputer brings to mind a power-sucking vortex of raw performance crammed inside a slick and simple cabinet that hides most of the hardware. The Grape-DR supercomputer isn’t your typical supercomputer model though.

The little beastie lacks the cabinet to hide all the hardware. Instead of that cabinet, the Grape-DR has a tangled mess of wires that will one day give a system admin a nightmare. The machine has super computer power though.

It never gets very cold here in the south so when winter rolls around we don’t think too much about keeping warm like people in colder climates do. A college in Switzerland called the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich had its new IBM super computer installed recently.

The school uses hot water to heat its buildings and IBM uses the excess hot water to cool the new supercomputer dubbed Aquasar. IBM says that using this left over hot water reduces the supercomputers carbon footprint by up to 85%.

If this doesn’t tell the Sony executives that they better get a killer app game out for its PlayStation 3 sooner rather than later, we don’t know what will. Over at the North Carolina State University an associate professor of computer science went out and bought eight PS3 units and then clustered them together to combine their processing power. Apparently the demos for “Resistance: Fall of Man” wasn’t enough to impress Dr. Frank Mueller about the PS3’s gaming ability, but he can get a decent level of supercomputing processing power out of the 64 logical processors that are banked together.

Mueller admits that his Sony supercomputer solution is constrained by the 256 megs of RAM and networking hiccups, but for $5,000 the Cell chip architecture gives high enough performance for a relatively cheap cost. And, Mueller says, if he had 10,000 PS3s …