A team of computational engineers at the University of Southampton has built a working supercomputer-like cluster out of 64 Raspberry Pi boards.

The cluster sits on racks made of Lego, runs off a standard mains socket, and has a total memory of 1TB, derived from 16GB SD cards on each Raspberry Pi. Its total cost was £2,500.

"As soon as we were able to source sufficient Raspberry Pi computers, we wanted to see if it was possible to link them together into a supercomputer," said Professor Simon Cox, who led the project and even enlisted the help of his six-year-old son James in the design.

The computer uses a system called MPI (Message Passing Interface) to communicate between nodes using Ethernet. According to Professor Cox, the machine's first task was to calculate Pi on the Raspberry Pi using MPI.