- Published on Wednesday, 28 March 2012 11:15 - Written by
Douglas Eadline - Hits: 4025 Much has changed in the
supercomputing arena. Even you can get in the game! Recently,
Sebastian Anthony wrote an article for ExtremeTech entitled What
Can You Do With A Supercomputer? His conclusion was "not much"
and for many people he is largely correct. However, there is
deeper understanding that may change the answer to "plenty." He
was mostly right when talking about the worlds largest
supercomputers. Indeed, one very workable past definition of a
supercomputer was "any computer that had at least a six digit
price tag." In the past, that was largely true and created a
rather daunting barrier to entry for those who needed to crunch
numbers. The cost was due to an architectural wall between
supercomputers and the rest of computing. These systems were
designed to perform math very quickly using vector processors.
It all worked rather well until the cost of fabrication made
creating your own vector CPU prohibitively expen