NEC's SX-8i "deskside" supercomputer
NEC, who you may recall once operated the world's fastest supercomputer, the Earth-Simulator (now the 4th fastest, boo hoo), are toning it down a bit for all us poor bastards who can't afford to buy some time on the beast. Their new limited-production system, the HPC Server SX-8i, is capable of processing 16 billion FLOPS—pretty decent compared to the 136,800 GFLOPS of IBM's full Blue Gene supercomputer. Granted, we have no idea how big the thing is (they say "deskside," which doesn't sound too promising), but if you're one to invest you'll be rewarded by a machine with up to 32GB of DRAM… and a $109,000 pricetag. Yeah, it's one of those.
