[ExI] homebrew cold freon bath super computer

[spike]

We have a tool at work which is a cold Freon bath: it uses the kind of Freon
we can still have, no chlorine, and maintains the Freon down to minus 20
celcius.  I heard from a colleague they were getting rid of it.  I have half
a mind to try to buy it at auction if I can get it for a song.  Reasoning:
we could set up a heat sink for a homebrew supercomputer.  

 

Freon is a low conductor, so we should be able to submerge a circuit card in
that stuff, ja?  A couple years ago a cell phone won a big chess tournament
which included two grandmasters (it beat one of them and drew the other, not
by phoning a friend but by doing all the calcs right there in realtime.)  So
modern phones make plenty of MIPS (processor hipsters, help me here please.)
I also know that phones are considered electronic waste once they get about
three yrs old, tossed into the trash. 

 

Idea: we get some application which is calculation intensive but does not
require a huge amount of communication between nodes such as chess or
Mersenne prime search, collect a bunch of these discarded phones, take the
processor cards out of them, remove the batteries and replace with an
external power source, figure out some kind of I/O system such as bluetooth,
stack the cards, submerge the whole mess in cold freon and BOOM, we have a
great poor-man's highly parallel super computer, ja?

 

Would that be a cool science fair project or what?

 

spike

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