SGI Supercomputer for Stephen Hawking's Cosmological Calcs

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Well it's known that the internet's history was a mixture of early warning system and an Academics tool for shifting vast quantities of data worldwide... well at least until people started getting home computers and learnt how to wardial, then no longer holding information on the full details of the results to an experiment was viable, as the corporates began utilising the hackers.

(If you say this doesn't/hasn't or never happened, just look to the microchip and silicon valley. Renound for losing is patentability to overseas.)

I would say that there are many supercomputers out there, there was even a mention of a project from 1996 for a supercomputer in Australia to recreate the human brain with the intention of discovering how to cure mental ailments.
 
US and its allies have a bunch of super computers (a bunch of Crays). But Cray had financial trouble - which means, their is not much demand for Crays or no one knows how to use them. Otherwise, we would have solved our weather prediction by now, or had a great economic model or co-related our genome with disease, traits and so on...or ... found a good language translator...

So, having or learning to build a super computer hardware is just one side of the coin. The otherside is a super software to go with it. That is not happening anytime soon.
 
ECM schools, banks, seti, most phone Co. use alpha sets by 8
With one sorce server,{thinktanks like... RTRM, MIT,CAS,}
Or build your own supercomputer
These days you can buy a cray for around a grand...
 
there is nothing wrong with Solaris. It is good for pure databases. But it is only an operating system. Somebody has to write a decent software to do some real work.

Since Mac OS X is based on Free BSD, it can do a similar job - that is distributed computing with great GUI interface. It has the most potential to benefit everyone. It all depends on Apple. Apple could take off like a rocket if they can port it to Intel platform.
 
The worlds largest and most powerful computer is the telecommunications network. It consists of every telephone switching office in every community in the world. Each office is just a large main frame computer that is run with huge software programs and each office can be monitered and given instructions just as a desktop computer can. This network has the capability of becoming conscious long before any other computer will. The software in this network is so sophisticated that it contains self diagnostic repair routines that is unfettered by man.
 
Odin, this hamster guesses that the most powerful “computer” in the world is no longer the traditional telephone system. (Though not that long ago it was.)

By this hamster’s guess there are less than five hundred thousand telephone switches (including corporate PBX's). The more powerful Telco switches use fairly old technology, a computer controlling racks of cards with each card being a special purpose IO processor. The total switching capability might be upwards of 90,000 ports with each port handling a bi-directional 64Kbit channel. That’s only around 10 billion bps with almost all the computing power dedicated to switching bits. The average computing power of those five hundred thousand switches is likely less than that of an old PC (since many of them ARE re-packaged PC’s). CPU power that is not totally dedicated to IO ports is likely less than ten thousand modern PC’s.

This hamster guesses that several corporate networks may have more processing power and may be running more complex software. This hamster suspects that the defense agencies and NSA have far more.

The truly awesome computer is the Internet and it’s cousins. The total CPU power, storage, complex programs, etc. puts everything else to shame. (Which is likely the point Oldie was making about communication networks.)
 
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