Mahoning County Career and Technical Center engineering teacher decided to bring a piece of popular culture into his class.
"I recorded the Jeopardy show where they had Watson the IBM computer playing against the top Jeopardy contestants," Bob Dukish said.
And that got these budding computer scientists and engineers thinking.
"We said well why can't we do that. We have a bunch of computers lying around," senior Robert Collins said.
So the students in the X-Treme Technology Engineering program got to work, using the IBM concept and created their own supercomputer.
"It was banks and banks of processors that were equivalent to 3,000 computers. Individual pc's. We don't have 3,000, but we came up with... I guess we have 12 computers," Dukish said.
Those 12 computers are connected together, and now act as one.
Junior Matthew Borner said he helped hook up all the computers with the ethernet cord to the switch hub and set up the file sharing network.
Six students took two days to set up their distributed computing system. While it went smoothly for the most part, they did run into a few obstacles.
Junior Curtis Troutman said there were problems with two computers.
"One was acting a little funny to where we had to shut it off and restart it. And one where it just froze," Troutman said.
The computer could be used for number crunching applications or even video games.
"I just hope that it really just turns out to be something big and exciting. I hope everyone looks to it and enjoys it," junior Dakesha Jordan said.
