MIT Pedal-Powers Supercomputer

The MIT cycling team harnessed their pedaling efforts for something other than propulsion – they put their watts towards powering a supercomputer. As part of Specialized’s Innovate or Die program, the goal of which is to harness pedaling power for nifty new purposes, the team hooked their bicycles into a very efficient supercomputer.

 

The MIT grad students powered the computer for 20 minutes, during which time Techworld estimates the computer did more calculations “than were done on the entire earth up to 1960.”

 

 

The coolest part about the project is its focus on current and future energy efficiency. Take a very efficient, old-school transportation machine (the bicycle) and use it to power an energy-conserving computer that is crunching numbers for a nuclear fusion reaction.

 

“By harnessing the energy creation processes of the sun, our research opens the possibility of limitless energy,” according to John Wright of MIT’s Plasma Science & Fusion Center. “But we still need to do our parts individually, such as by using energy-efficient computers in our research.”

 

via Treehugger.