> Another way to put it is that specialized supercomputers no longer exist, and the top500 is now populated with super-branded racks of PCs running Linux with s

> Another way to put it is that specialized supercomputers no longer exist, and the top500 is now populated with super-branded racks of PCs running Linux with souped up network cards. While there's a grain of truth in this, in reality, a supercomputer still looks like a room full of refrigerators and not at all like a typical computer or even a server farm. Some of the computer hardware in there is just commodity hardware but for example the interconnects can't really be described as "souped up network cards", they're in a category of their own. Yes, the era of the Cray boxes is gone but a supercomputer is still a supercomputer.