sure, its a time game. but I remember a 60GF (maybe it was 30?) result on the CM-2 in the early nineties. I think that machine was $40M, give or take. Lets also

sure, its a time game. but I remember a 60GF (maybe it was 30?) result on the CM-2 in the early nineties. I think that machine was $40M, give or take. Lets also pretend that it was 10 years before we could have done the same runs on a commodity machine. You can imagine that for things of sufficient importance, there is an arguable cost utility. Of course that one machine ran quite a number of codes 24/7 But there is a second order effect, maybe a lot of that cultural history was lost before SIMD really caught on, but in general I think we gain quite a bit of collective experience by pushing the state of the art. OTOH, maybe since games ended up driving the development, and HPC ended up trying to adapt their workloads to those platforms, you could argue that it was wasted effort. But to echo my earlier comment, programming models to easily exploit substantial concurrencies is where the real sugar is.