🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov15.201147.5302@athena.mit.edu> solman@athena.mit.edu (Jason W Solinsky) writes:
>It seems to me that supercomputing power costs about $250,000 per GFLOP
>nowadays. It also seems to me that a company could sell a GFLOP box that
>has enough memory, I/O and internal bandwidth to support near peak
>performance at under $10,000 and have PLENTY of profit margin.
>
>My question is, when people buy supercomputers at $250,000 per GFLOP, what are
>they getting in addition to computational power?
I/O, SCALAR performance, compilers, an operating system, folks who live
with the system and fix it when it breaks, the ability to run major third-
party codes and get the right answers, help with porting YOUR applications, and
a CREDIBLE growth path -- confidence that the vendor will be able to grow a 
system to meet your needs.

I'm sure in the next few years you will be able to buy a 1-GFLOP CHIP (i860 or
Alpha compatible) for a few hundred dollars; perhaps $10K for the board-level
version with some memory (will it be enough???) and some kind of I/O (is VME
fast enough????).  If cost per GFLOP is your criterion, you should be buying
an array processor board and putting it in a workstation.  But if you want to
do supercomputing, I'm afraid you're going to have to buy a supercomputer.