SGI's Octane III is a "personal supercomputer," which isn't to say it's designed for you to play video games and check your email on. It's just a supercomputer that garage physicists might be able to save up for.

Octane III is office-ready with a pedestal, one-by-two-foot form factor, whisper-quiet operations, easy-to-use features, low maintenance requirements and support for standard office power outlets. While a typical workstation has only eight cores and moderate memory capacity, the superior design of the Octane III permits up to 80 high-performance cores and nearly 1TB of memory for unparalleled performance...

Octane III is easily configurable with single- and dual-socket node choices, and offers a wide selection of performance, storage, graphics, GP-GPU and integrated networking options. Yielding the same leading power efficiencies inherent in all SGI Eco-Logical compute designs, Octane III supports the latest Intel processors to capitalize on greater levels of performance, flexibility and scalability.

For about $8,000, it's not cheap by normal computer standards, but by supercomputer standards it's a bargain. [SGI via The Inquirer via Boing Boing]