The new, $53 million eight-teraflop supercluster will be the largest computer open to academic researchers in the world, according to Dan Reed, director of the Urbana-based National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

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Reed likened the center's achievement to Greek philosopher Archimedes' boast that given a lever and the right place to stand, he could move the world.
"This is the intellectual lever," he said.

[link|http://www.news-gazette.com/story.cfm?Number=10061|[link|http://www.news-gazette.com/story.cfm?Number=10061|http://www.news-gaz...Number=10061]]

The disparagement of BG?
[quote]
NCSA estimated that clustering PCs on a high-speed communications system can yield the same computing power as a single-vendor supercomputer, for half to a fifth of the cost.
If a component burns out, Intel can replace the Itanium processor. If a server becomes outdated, IBM can rack up a fresh unit.
And because the operating system is the open-source Linux, the NCSA will never have to wait for Bill Gates to release yet another beta version.
[/quote]