More Power

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MORE POWER

The evolution of supercomputers has continued along divergent paths. Less than five years after Cray's death in 1996, Apple Computer's G4 series of supercomputers became the first desktop systems to deliver a sustained performance of more than one gigaflop, with a theoretical peak performance of 5.3 gigaflops. The G4 Cube takes up less than eight square inches of desk space, and costs less than $2,000. By 2001, the world's most powerful supercomputers, from companies like Cray, Inc. and NEC, could deal with trillions of calculations per second and MPPs (massively parallel processors). They cost millions.

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