[citation][nom]mtyermom[/nom]You would have preferred phenoms? [/citation]
I think he was referring to the fact that this is just a glorified workstation rather than an actual supercomputer with highly customized CPUs. And just two of them for $9000? Hell, even a Skulltrail could probably destroy this at thousands less.
When Nehalem comes out that should shake things up in the HPC market. Also for any high intense calculations (only some kinds of calculations) one can also use a GPU based solution if possible, which is much cheaper than any CPU solution.
Uh guys... Read the article.
"Considering that the enclosure alone costs about $9,000..."
The enclosure is $9k. Not the computer. That's expensive as fuck.
It's easy to customize the machine on Cray's site to cost over $100K. Each node costs roughly between about $5K and $10K, and there is room for up to 8 nodes, depending on the type of node. There is almost no point in buying a configuration that costs less than a $25k, considering the base expenses.