Jones Beene wrote:
Actually the price of entry into terabyte computing has dropped in the past 4 years from $25 million(minimum) to less than $5,000, and will likely continue to exceed Moore's Law for a while.
I believe that is because recent breakthroughs are mainly in massively parallel processing (MPP) software, rather than hardware. Hardware is dependent on Moore's law, but software is not. MPP software was very difficult to develop and it lagged for many years, so you might say progress was held back and it is now catching up.
Google has made the largest contribution to this software. Their equipment in the aggregate constitutes the world's largest MPP supercomputer. When you look back at the grand early supercomputers such as Illiac, it is kind of a letdown to realize that the world's most impressive computer today is held together with Velcro, and used mainly for advertising.
- Jed
