Supercomputers fast enough to one day perform one thousand trillion floating point operations per second are entering the market and finding homes in U.S. weapons labs and other scientific research centers. In a sense, supercomputer users have something in common with the fighter pilot in the movie Top Gun who said, "I feel the need for speed." When it comes to computers, however, the demand is for higher processing speed, not a high closure rate on an opposing fighter. For the Cray XT4 supercomputer intro-duced in mid-November, this means a system with up to 30,000 Opteron off-the-shelf processors.
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