A stack of Apple laptops could work as a powerful supercomputer

Supercomputers are expensive to buy and run, but connecting up lots of consumer Apple computers that contain M1 chips may be able to do the same job for less

By Matthew Sparkes

A cluster of standard Apple laptops could work as a supercomputer, enabling people to do computationally demanding tasks in a cheaper way.

Researchers who need powerful computers to run their experiments have been moving away from monolithic supercomputers, which are expensive to build and maintain. Instead, they have often preferred clusters of devices originally designed as graphics cards for desktop computers. These graphics processing units (GPUs) can perform large numbers of parallel calculations, but strong demand …