[geeks] Massively parallel... cheap?

[David Passmore]

Hi folks,

I am in need of some recommendations. I have a project in mind that will
require a machine (or cluster) with some pretty beefy capabilities:

* 64+ processors (the more, the better!)
* Several gigabytes of memory -- this is basically a big disk cache
* ability to address 1TB+ of disk

The computation this system will be performing is most likely going to be
simple integer math and comparisons-- *maybe* floating point but I doubt it.
The working data set will be *huge*, several gigabytes in size, with
somewhere between 10000 and 100000+ data points being computed at any given
'time'. Think about a talk similar to simulating the movement of a million
stars and that's pretty much what I'm up against, which is why it has to
execute as many operations in parallel as possible. If someone has something
brilliant to say here, I'd sure love to hear it.

The real catch: this has to run in my basement, or in colo, so the Cray on
eBay is out of the question. ;) What can folks suggest in terms of a system
or cluster to run this kind of task on?

David