OK, so one of my appartment mates who before break had bought a bunch of computer stuff and rebuilt a machine in his room bought 2 servers and set them up in his room now. I was alerted to their presence by the loud whirr of cooling fans. One is 48 cores, the other is 32 cores. Solid state drives, too. And he has a 4 core laptop.
Says he is doing distributed computing for Stanford on a protein folding program, but really he says he just likes computer parts.
You should see the cooling fans (and a normal desk oscillating fan to boot).
He has not tried to sleep with the fans on yet, since he just got back today.
Dave, sounds like you have a potential protege.