From the seemingly insatiable quest for computing power, a new generation of computers was spawned--magnificently powerful supercomputers that can cost as much as $17 million and do millions of tasks per second.
Steven Armentrout, chief executive of one such company Parabon Computation, based in Fairfax, Virginia points out that large organisations often need computing power in bursts, but that supercomputers are designed to provide sustained power.
In recent years, the amount of data produced has been exploding at a rate far greater than the increase in computing power of even large supercomputers.
Thus, moving from simply releasing data sets, but also working to democratize access to the tools and computing power to use such tools.
Based on current credit statistics, together they supply 106 TeraFLOPS of computing power - far more than any conventional supercomputer.
That means a one-man designer, a graduate designer, can get access to the same amount of computing power as these big multinational companies.
Evidence of this heterogeneity includes the wide range of network transmission rates, varying across many orders of magnitude, and the vast differences in computing power, ranging from PDA's to supercomputers.
At the same time, it provides computing power to researchers that even eclipses that of supercomputers because of the limited availability of the latter.
"Moore's Law [that computing power doubles every 18 months] doesn't apply to software," says Marc Snir, an IBM supercomputer manager.
The amount of computing power consumed by its transaction-verification system, which has the side-effect of "mining" new Bitcoins, is mushrooming: it now far exceeds that of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers combined.
Computing power grows exponentially.
