TECHNOLOGY; Computer Gains Driven by Consumer Products – New York Times
By John Markoff – June 21, 2001
The twice-annual ranking of the world’s 500 fastest computers, being issued today, shows that the United States still has a significant lead in building powerful supercomputers.
But the list is also an indication that increasingly the world of supercomputing is no longer at the cutting edge of computing technology. The remarkable increases in speed and the falling prices of microprocessors and memory chips are turning the modern computing industry upside down. Powerful new technologies are increasingly being introduced first in consumer electronics rather than the scientific and military computers that once dominated the computer world.