alt Hacker NewsTOP500 can be done with inexpensive silicon. It is more about a willingness to aggregate enough hardware in one place. As a benchmark, it tells you almost nothing about computing power or scalability for other applications because it doesn't exercise the bottlenecks most high-scale applications have.
> TOP500 can be done with inexpensive silicon.
Didn't the DoD at one point build a 1k+ PS3 cluster based on their multi-core chip and had a mini supercomputer CotS?
I remember Sony not liking that people were buying them for other things rather than gaming (iirc they were losing money on hardware at the time) so they bricked linux support soon after.