Talk-Polywell.org

I ran across this by accident today: arxiv.org/pdf/0908.4362
"The performance results show that CUDA is an attractive parallel computing environment for MHD simulations." This is similar to the theory we need to model for Polywell, and can be taken as proof of principle.

I also priced a 4 Terraflop unit with 48 GB of ram from Amax. It came in at $12k. I am not finding a whole lot of software support yet for the kind of work I'd like to do with PDE's, so you can't just buy stuff off the shelf yet. But I don't think it'll be too much longer.

Kind of stunning to me. 10 years ago that kind of processing power ran better than $20 million. And it took and army of programmers to make it go.

I don't thing processing power is going to be a problem any more!

You should also look into parallel Playstation 3s. They've been used for quite a bit of stuff, due to the power they pack, and you'll probably get some open source help on the programming.

Most electronics don't fail at the microchip, IIRC. They fail with a capacitor, or other such component. If you're good with a soldering iron, you can probably get a hold of some non-functional PS3s and repair them--surface mount is possible with a hand iron, just difficult, hence you need to be good. This could potentially get you quite a bit of power with minimal upfront cost.

I posted a link back in February regarding use of Playstations as super computers here.
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The group has done some interesting work.