The Bicycle-Powered Supercomputer

Attention cyclicsts: your performance will now be measured in billions of calculations per second, not miles per hour.

Green computing is in this week. First Lenovo builds an ultra-efficient PC that can tap a solar panel for power, and now SiCortex unveils this: a supercomputer powered by a team of eight cyclists. The SC648 debuted at Wired magazine’s NextFest on Friday with members of Jax Racing team providing the juice for a demonstration.

Of course, the company has no real aspirations of its computers running nonstop on human power alone, but the demonstration was intended to prove just how far they’ve come in reducing the power consumption. “We set out to show that we can build a serious high performance computer while reducing power requirements to levels that were previously thought to be impossible,” said SiCortex CEO Dr. John Mucci, in a statement. “Today’s demonstration dramatically illustrates what can be achieved when we focus on addressing these power issues.”

The machine is already being put to the test at the United States Department of Agriculture, where an application running on the SC648 is analyzing and comparing insect pests to determine which are closely related and to uncover new species.