Imagine the entire internet fitting into ONE (big) computer. That is IBM’s vision as defined in its Kittihawk Project. As for now, the biggest computer in the world is controlled by – you guessed it – Google. It assembles roughly a million of pizza-box-size PC, in dozens of datacenters across the world (this is called the “Cloud”). Works fine for you and me, but as viewed by IBM computer scientists, it is like building an electric power plant out of portable generators (unfair : computers can be programmed, generators can’t). Anyway, those clusters of cheap computers are extremely demanding in terms of power, cooling and interconnection. By comparison, one computer containing thousands, or even millions, of processors can do a better job more efficiently.
> see this white paper (at least he first half is accessible)
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