I recommend the book "The Supermen" about Seymour Cray, National Labs, etc and that will give you the necessary context to understand. Bottom line, it didn't u

I recommend the book "The Supermen" about Seymour Cray, National Labs, etc and that will give you the necessary context to understand. Bottom line, it didn't used to be this way and supercomputing degenerates to lowest common denominator without starting from square one every now and then.