Actually, commodity hardware that you can buy today for less than $1000 would have made it to the top tiers of HPC Top500 just 11 or 12 years ago. But most of t

Actually, commodity hardware that you can buy today for less than $1000 would have made it to the top tiers of HPC Top500 just 11 or 12 years ago. But most of this was done in a step by step evolution of old technologies, not in a revolutionary way, because most of the revolutionary technologies that make the news are not really feasible for mass production (at least at the time of the discovery - remember the costs of the solid-state drives back in the '90s).