I question the premise of this question and analysis! There is an enormous breadth of work done on clusters vs supercomputers already. It turns out that suffici

I question the premise of this question and analysis! There is an enormous breadth of work done on clusters vs supercomputers already. It turns out that sufficiently parallelizable ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel ) tasks can be accomplished much more efficiently on clusters. They've been en vogue in academia for years, I remember playing with the cluster at ND in 2002. Just wow.