Can anyone provide back of the napkin calculations on this proposed supercomputers computing power vs Googles compute farm?
Therefore, even if the raw performance in terms of FLOPS sound similar, the two systems will have widely differing performance on real workloads.
Capturing and indexing the entire web is certainly a real workload, even if it is massively psrallelizable, so it would probably run equally well on Google's infrastructure as on a supercomputer because those fast interconnects wouldn't provide much advantage, right?
However,when simulating a nuclear explosion or a weather system (maybe that's what you mean by "real" workloads?), the heavy node-to-node communication makes the supercomputer much, much better suited.