Would you like a Super Computer with that?
Found on the Globe and Mail web site.
The students who use the computer lab at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., probably aren't aware that at night the lab transforms into the equivalent of a supercomputer.
All day long, St. Francis Xavier University students sit at the lab's rows of PCs to surf the Internet, write papers, arrange dates or listen to podcasts. During the day, the machines run Microsoft's Windows operating system. But at night that all changes. At 11 p.m, the students are gone, the doors are locked and the lights are out. It's time to close Windows until morning.
The workstations begin to automatically shut down. But about 400 of them are soon back up and running a GNU/Linux operating system as one big connected cluster of processing power -- a grid computer.