Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, have managed to invent a supercomputer made of off-the-shelf parts running a free operating system. The computer, called Avalon, consists of 68 computers with Alpha central processing units (CPUs), networked together with Fast EtherNet and running the Linux operating system. Linux is a free Unix derivative that first began on Intel, but has been adapted to a number of other platforms, including Alpha. While supercomputers usually cost millions of dollars, the total for Avalon came to only $150,000 (£100,000), all of it hardware.

The lab used Red Hat Linux 5.0, published by Red Hat Software. It took three days to assemble the computer and get the system running at 10 gigaflops per second, well in the range of supercomputing. They later got it to run at 19.2 Gflops per second, ranking it as the 315th fastest supercomputer in the world, according to a list of the 500 fastest supercomputers, published at the Supercomputer 98 conference in Mannheim, Germany last month.