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I stopped being impressed by supercomputers like 5 years ago. These days it's all about money. You can buy as many CPUs/RAM, and connect them together.

I'm much more impressed by the advances in CPU architecture. SSDs have been amazing so far. Networking has been improving too.

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What impressed you about the supercomputers of 5 years ago that no longer impresses you about today's supercomputers? The Cray approach (http://www.nccs.gov/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/UserMeeting20...) and the IBM approach (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene#Blue_Gene.2FQ) both seem more interesting than just connecting together as many CPUs/RAM as you can afford.

There are interesting OS challenges for the compute nodes, interesting hardware challenges on interconnect, interesting filesystem challenges, interesting programming challenges to manage the parallelism, competing architectural approaches between CPUs and GPU-accelerated clusters ... it's a pretty interesting space!

Actually that's not exactly true, since Linpack doesn't really lend itself to architecture's like say, Google's, where you have lots of machines sitting on the network. The bandwidth between the nodes, and its latency becomes the determining factor. So for these guys it is all about the interconnect rather than just how many CPUs you can put in a rack.

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