Supercomputers To Move To Specialization?

lucasw writes "The Japan Earth Simulator outperformed a computer at Los Alamos (previously the world's fastest) by a factor of three while using fewer, more specialized processors and advanced interconnect technology. This spawned multiple government reports that many suspected would ask for more funding in the U.S. for custom supercomputer architectures and less emphasis on clustering commodity hardware. One report released yesterday suggests a balanced approach."

Comments

I don't care what approach we use

[Cornflake917]

As long as the Japanese can't run Quake3 at a higher FPS than we can!

Ooh this is bad...

[superpulpsicle]

Last thing I need is a supercomputer that checks email at a high speed, and a separate computer that does wordprocessing even faster.

I am one of those people with maxed out PCI cards, maxed out SCSI buses and everything jammed into one PC.

Work, pr0n, email, /. all in one box.

It does matter

[Cyno]

how many supercomputer we build. We'll still be wasting cycles processing the first few nanoseconds of nuclear explotions on them or trying to find more oil or money or WMDs. The last thing we care about is the environment we all have to live in.

I wonder how rich we'll be when it finally hits us that irrepairable damage has been caused to our environment? I hope we're really rich so we can afford to buy a new Earth. Cuz we might need one by then.