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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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?<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Would that be a cool science fair project or what?<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>spike<o:p></o:p></p></div></body></html>