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from the article "250 Teraflops per rack" and "a single NVIDIA Tesla K40 chip costs around $4,000. ... If you have four fully loaded racks, that’s over 700 chips. We’re talking some serious power for serious cash." so that's about 3m for 1PFlop

4000 is only for the GPU though, not the whole node.

I was reading this, thinking the numbers don't mean much (to me) without context. What does your average cluster cost and how many petaflops would you get for you buck there?

The computers cost 10 billion dollars? Who buys them? That would be above the noise floor of even the NSA's budget.

Sorry, I meant one to three orders of magnitude. The most expensive computer I know of is the Japanese K computer at ~ 1.25 billion and 10 something Petaflops. This was mostly politically motivated (Japanese chips) and too costly for what it does IMO. A typical new supercomputer in the Top 500 today is in the order of 100 million.

That might be true, but to establish it, we would have to know the NSA'a budget (which is classified).