The original microwulf was developed by Dr. Joel Adams at Calvin College. It was designed as a low cost (sub $2500) Beowulf cluster for use on the desk. With maximum performance weighing in around 26.25 GFLOPS, it got a price per GFLOP of around $94.10. It is both impressive and cool looking.
At Marquette, we wanted something similar: a small, inexpensive parallel computer that we could take to area high schools and demonstrate the power and design of computers. So we built our own and called is slayer (more on that later). Our goals were to at least double the computational power without doubling the price, given Moore's law this was achievable. Additionally, we wanted to add graphics processors to the system to extend the computational power for certain problem types.
At the time of purchasing computer parts cost less than $1800 and adding mounting components brought the total cost to around $1950 (details can be found on the hardware manifest). As of writing, our maximum performance was 55.76 GFLOPS on the CPUs. This gives us a price per GFLOP of about $35.03!