When I was working as a telephone engineer back in 1982, I asked a customer what the whirring noise I could hear from their desk. The manager came in puffed out his chest & said "Oh, that the 10Mb Winchester Hard Disk." To which I said, "What on Earth do you need all that memory for?" I'd just bought a ZX81 with a 32kb ExpandeRam!

There is no way that thing would be able to run Crysis on medium mode. Does it even have DirectX 10 support?

Quote: "Hewlett-Packard-based cluster, sporting 14,400 processors, 28TB of memory, and 140TB of disk storage. EKA has a peak performance of 180 teraflops per second, has a sustained computation capacity of 120 teraflops..."

Should just about be able to run Vista then. Can I buy one in PC World?

More like 3560 blades (maybe 1780) with 2Gb RAM per core and appx 100Gb disk per core. (I don't know if top500 counts processors as per-core, or per physical package)

Once its looked at that ways and you realize that its a pile of boxes, the oodles-of-RAM-and-disk is quite a bit less impressive.

You know, I've been looking for the proper term to sum up "marketing", thank you!

Mine is the rain suit with hat & NBC mask, my friends, from marketing all have jackets with an extra pocket for optional colostomy bags.

You made my day!

and the answer is still:

101010

Isn't there such a small market for these cluster machines, and really when you start dealing with such astronomic numbers or iterations of computation how sure can you really be the answer is accurate.

'Computer says "no" '

Is it really a pile of blades? then it is a piece of s***, as HP blades share Ethernet fabric.. I would (and do) design these things as piles of Proliant doalprocessor servers.. and hey, you can put multiple multi-giga-ethernet adapters there!!

Seymour Cray would be ashamed of current "supercomputers", if it turns out that the 4th most powerful supercomputer is just a bunch of el-cheapo x86 blade boxen.

It seems that the "1024 chicken" philosophy won after all, and we're now doomed to use mediocre hardware for all eternity!

Mine is the one with the liquid N2 cooling system ;)