DON'T HAVE a couple of hundred thousand to buy a supercomputer? Don't worry, neither did two York physicists, so they decided to make their own.

Professor Roman Koniuk and PhD student Chris Stewart decided to go against the grain of the UNIX and PC-dominated environment when they used a $20,000 grant to buy five Power MacG3s. Using fast-Ethernet networking and parallel-processing software the scientists came up with a configuration that lets them do some serious number crunching without waiting in line for access to traditional supercomputers.

The physicists have dubbed their machine the "D'Artagnan Cluster" in honour of the hero in The Three Musketeers. "The machines work in parallel, not sequentially," says Stewart. "So it's a team effort ? rather like the musketeers."

The researchers heard about clustering Macintosh computers from Project Appleseed, underway at UCLA. Stewart and Koniuk said the idea of multiple computers sounded like the ideal cost effective and simple solution to their problems.

"The process was pretty simple," says Koniuk. "We hooked them together and they talked. Basically, these five stations do calculations at 10 times the speed of even a relatively fast workstation."

The success of D'Artagnan has raised a great deal of interest from universities around the world and, say the York researchers, fits in with Apple Corp's move into research and higher education.