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Supercomputer On the Cheap
jbrodkin writes "You don't need Ivy League-type cash to get a supercomputer anymore. Organizations with limited financial resources are snatching up IBM supercomputers now that Big Blue has lowered the price of Blue Gene/L. Alabama-Birmingham and other universities that previously couldn't afford such advanced technology are using supercomputers to cure diseases at the protein level and to solve equally challenging problems. IBM dropped the price of the Blue Gene/L to $800K late last year before releasing a more powerful model, Blue Gene/P, last month. Sales of Blue Gene/L have more than doubled since then, bringing supercomputing into more corners of the academic and research worlds."
Distributed processing is fine for "embarrassingly parallel" problems where the compute nodes don't need to communicate with each other. However, many problems solved by supercomputers or large clusters need communication between the compute nodes, so aren't amenable to distributed solutions.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Nope, at least on the PS2 count (I don't know about Mac G5s). Back in 2000, Saddam Hussein was purchasing Sony PS2s by the thousands, which were then banned from export, due to them being classified as munitions.
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If you search through the whole top500 list, you'll find these Ivy Leaguers with Blue Gene computers:
#93 Harvard
#382 Princeton
But, there are plenty of other US schools on the list with Blue Gene computers (and a many outside the U.S. as well):
#5 SUNY Stony Brook
#7 Renssellaer Polytechnic
#63 California-San Diego #374 Boston University
#376 Iowa State
#379 MIT
#383 Alabama-Birmingham