Earlier this year, I wrote about how the field of supercomputing was starting to get boring. Oh how wrong I was.
The latest Top 500 list came out this week, and Virginia's Big Mac G5 Cluster entered the list at #3. The #2 supercomptuer is IBM's ASCI-Q at Los Alamos. The top machine is still Japan's Earth Simulator.
What's so interesting? The Big Mac was purchased at the Apple Store for one. It marks Apple's entry onto the Top 500 list. It is more expensive than some of the early Beowulf efforts, but it delivers 10 TFLOP for $5M. By comparison, the Earth Simulator delivers 35 TFLOP at an estimated cost somewhere north of $350M. (According to MacDN and other sources.)
UVA built a supercomputer with off-the-shelf parts for $500K/TFLOP, while NEC's machine uses specialized chips and cost $10M/TFLOP to build. That 20x differential is quite surprising.
What's next? Things will get interesting when Hollywood can get 1TFLOP on the desktop for a high end workstation, followed a few years later when 1TFLOP machines become affordable enough to put on a parent's desk (to edit videos of the kids, of course).
Oh, and IBM expects its BlueGene to break the PetaFLOP barrier in a couple of years, once they have a chance to build out all of the nodes. It's intended purpose? Protein folding simulations.
