Shuttle barebone systems may be used in various environments and as totally different solutions. One can play games on Shuttle SFF system, another can use it in an office and some XPS versions are very suitable for building network appliances and other similar devices on their base. But definitely the most surprising way of XPC use it to utilise a lot of them as a cluster. Apparently, there are some specialists over here, who managed to build a super-computer, called The Space Simulator, based on 294 Shuttle XPC computers.

The Space Simulator is a 294-processor Beowulf cluster. It is based on the Shuttle XPC SS51G mini chassis, which uses a heat pipe instead of a CPU fan. The small size of the XPC cases allowed them to fit the cluster in about half the space of the previous 144-processor Avalon cluster. Each node consists of a 2.53GHz Pentium 4 processor, 1GB of PC2700 DDR SDRAM, an 80GB Maxtor hard drive, and a 3Com 3C996B-T Gigabit Ethernet card. The cost of an individual node was less than $1000. The network switch is composed of a Foundry FastIron 1500 switch trunked to another FastIron 800 switch, which provides a total of 304 Gigabit Ethernet ports using the 16-port JetCore modules. The system was delivered in late September, 2002. It achieved Linpack performance of 665.1Gflops on 288 processors in October 2002, making it the 85th fastest computer in the world according to the TOP500 list.

The Space Simulator Cluster is dedicated to perform computational astrophysics simulations in the Theoretical Astrophysics group (T-6) at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It is a follow-on to the Loki and Avalon clusters.

You can see an astonishing photograph of a lot Shuttle XPCs working in one cluster here.