it depends on the what is meant by a computer. i'd refer to it as a mini-cluster that can fit into a basement for heating in the context of this article (and so

it depends on the what is meant by a computer. i'd refer to it as a mini-cluster that can fit into a basement for heating in the context of this article (and soon enough , moore's law, that will be a desktop size). On that scale, all these tasks are embarassingly parallel. Exceptions to this are multiuser systems where users interactions matter, such as facebook, in which case a huge cluster is required. My argument is that more computing will devoted to the former (basically machine learning, and scientific/engineering optimization) than the latter (multi-user databases) over time, simply because humans can only enter so much info (all 7 billion of us) compared to what machines can gather and compute.