Who is delivering the technology? Cray sells a commercial supercomputer with more than 1.4 teraflops of power. And Cisco has produced a router called the CRS-1 that can handle 1.2 terabits a second and can be grouped in clusters capable of routing 92 terabits a second. That kind of capacity is designed only for the backbones of the biggest telecommunications companies, but according to analysts, networking gear of that speed will eventually hit corporate networks.Some high-performance-computing addicts are already putting together huge clusters of relatively cheap computers to deliver multiple teraflops of computing power. The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, for one, has combined 1,058 IBM Opteron servers and 520 Intel Itanium 2 machines into a Linux cluster with more than 11 teraflops of power.
Think how fast your son could run Doom 3 or Halo 2 on that kind of setup.