RightScale 1M+ Server Contest

On April 21, 2010 at 8 AM EST, the winning number was 1,094,283. Congratulations to our winners!

• Hameedullah Khan
• Geoff McCarron-Benson
• Darren Lipman

As part of the contest, we asked "What would you do with one million servers?" Below are some of our favorite responses:

• Analyze how to generate cheap power from fusion technologies
• Stream live concerts all over the world
• Develop jelly belly recipes...
• Bathe in their warm glow and hum
• Buy a Ferrari…
• Build a unicorn sanctuary
• Give someone a free iPad
• Calculate when the Mets would win the World Series again ...
• I would distribute them to non-profit organizations
• Calculate PI with 60 billion decimal digits
• Destroy Skynet
• Replace all politicians with AI
• Build one hell of a SETI farm
• I would put them to work trying to find cures for cancer and other diseases that do not have a cure yet.
• Create a logistical mapping system that could predict patterns in human behaviors to determine resource deficits and automatically allocate the necessary resources to said areas, without political bias. This would create an equanimity in resource availability that would give the people of the world a better building block for developing for themselves a better quality of life that is consistent with their cultural ideals and not dependent on the cultural ideals of other nations.
• Throw a huge party
• If these were real servers (rather than virtualized ones) I bet you could squeeze maybe a tenth of a gram of gold out of each box. 1,000,000 servers would give you about 100,000 grams of gold. At the going rate, that's about $4 million. That could take a decent chunk out of world hunger.