Ask HN: What's the best way to acquire cheap computing power for uni projects?

I'm in a pickle with my MSc Computer Science project as I've been a little more ambitious than I perhaps should've been and am looking to examine reporting of semi-structured data from ECM systems (notably SharePoint) using Oracle and possibly Cassandra (compare and contrast a traditional RDBMS extended for Xml against a object store built for semi-structured data). The ECM system is going to require several virtual servers to implement, and a few more will be allocated to both Oracle and Cassandra. I'm looking for a cost-effective way of running multiple (in the order of 6) virtual servers concurrently. The university department does not appear to have spare capacity available for my use (it's a lot of hardware dedicated to a single student) and I've examined cloud based solutions such as Amazon AWS, Azure, etc but the cost of running a mix of Windows and Linux servers for 4 to 6 months on the cloud is extremely prohibitive. I'm now of the opinion that it's best to build a system at home, but I don't really want to have multiple cheap workstations heating up the front room. I could build my own system, but paying full retail price on parts makes it more expensive than buying an off-the-shelf workstation so I'm now looking at workstations that could take 12GB to 16GB of RAM. Yet none of the workstations I've found come out cheap enough to be ramen affordable... they're bordering on lobster. Systems like the Lenovo D20, Sun Ultra 27 and the Apple Mac Pro look appropriate but costly when kitted out with enough RAM and disk to do the job. So my questions are: If you needed to run 6 x 2GB RAM servers for 6 months on the cheap, how would you approach it? If I end up going down the workstation route are there established ways for post-grad students to get hardware for their projects at silly-low prices? (I've failed to find any obvious ways to obtain more than a very small student discount as the corp websites unfortunately don't appear to have a "Are you a post-grad student looking for a huge discount?" link). For info, I'm based in London, UK... so prices I'm looking at are all GBP which pushes the cost up a bit.