i believe that to qualify as a supercomputer, a machine must be able to perform a gigaflop (one billion floating point operations in one second of time), which many, many consumer-level machines can do. so yeah, you're right, it's not that super by today's standards; perhaps they should redefine the term "supercomputer".
I don't think there is a standard definition of the the term. The
comp.sys.super
tries to give an answer, but it is a little squishy.
apple released a bunch of data about their dual-cpu machines claiming they can pump out 15 gigaflops. that's approximately 25% of what this cray is capable of. given current cheap computing performance, i don't see how cray will be able to make this machine appealing to anyone without making it really cheap. $10k? $8k?
It's true that the market for "old-school" supercomputers seems to be shrinking, but I think you're glossing over a lot of things when you make
the claim that a 2-head Mac has 25% of the capability of this computer. There is something to be said for memory size, memory bandwidth, and I/O bandwidth which don't figure in to your calculation. The Mac is unlikely approach 15 gigaflops except on a problem that fits in cache.
In Seattle a local bar had a Star Wars celebration
by showing the Turkish version of Star Wars. It's
hard to describe, but if I just say that it did not
have a Death Star or Lightsabers and there were a
lot of horses, I think you get the idea.
We also watched the 1978 Star Wars Christmas special. I can report that it is a lot of fun to watch when you're drinking gin.
With hard disks you have things like RAID to
protect against disk failure. No such thing with
RAM. Sure, you can get protection from a bit
going bad, but not for loosing a chip.
The company I work for makes computers with a lot
of RAM and so we've been researching how to
survive a RAM chip failure, but as far as I know
no system implements such a technology.
Slashdot Mirror
We also watched the 1978 Star Wars Christmas special. I can report that it is a lot of fun to watch when you're drinking gin.
Happy life day!
I dunno. I think that maybe making it "accessible" means adding more product placements.
I guess Microsoft has taught the media that anything less than version 3.0 isn't a really out of beta testing yet.
The company I work for makes computers with a lot of RAM and so we've been researching how to survive a RAM chip failure, but as far as I know no system implements such a technology.
This is in Seattle, we're all unemployed. Maybe they're living off .com severence?
Perhaps part of the reason why you don't agree with other people's assessment of Perl is that you aren't very experienced in the alternatives.
I think Perl is a fine replacement for /bin/sh scripts.
But, I have seen people write applications in Perl, and it wasn't
pretty.