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Comment by onalark | Hacker News Reader

An iPad does resemble the supercomputers of yore, between its superscalar, vector processing (GPU), and multicore architecture.

The Parallella brings distributed-memory programming in, which is a very important development.

You and I strongly disagree on the meaningfulness or definition of the term supercomputer. Here's an easy definition: A supercomputer is any single, unified, computer system that is currently one of the fastest 500 in the world.

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Another grumpy old man here. I disagree with your classification. By your analogy, you'd be building a classical Ferrari capable of the speeds of that classical Ferrari, not a model. The fact that it can't measure up to today's super computers does not mean that it isn't constructed along some of the same lines and shares a lot of traits with it. Back when Beowulf clusters first came into vogue all the 'real' supercomputer people were saying 'but that isn't a real supercomputer, you're using multiple CPU's' and we all know how that discussion ended.

Give the man a break, wait a couple of years and he'll give you a 4K core cpu supercomputer for little money, that needs to be encouraged, not talked down. It's early days.

I actually disagree with your definition of supercomputer, and liken it to any compute system or cluster with more power than an average enterprise server or workstation. After all, they really exist to solve problems which can't be solved by traditional computing.

I think the metric of it being one of the fastest 500 in the world is a little disingenuous to all of the other supercomputers out there.

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