Wow if you really have a 386DX66, don't lose it, it's one of a kind.

AFAIK a good part of the trouble they had when running the french TGV to >550km/h speeds was related to the overhead electrical lines. Waves propagating along the line and preventing a good contact between the line and the train.

Plus with this kind of train, there is no ground connection. So they would need two overhead electrical lines.

Looks that they designed the thing so the light of a star is not measured by a single pixel:

The CCDs are not used to take pictures. The images are intentionally defocused to 10 arc seconds to improve the photometric precision.

Any modern compiler will see that this code does nothing and simply remove it. Your benchmark is a no-op :-)

> The real innovatiors should be recognized for their efforts to reduce space, power and cost

Trust me, to build a computer for the top of the top500, you have to be pretty good at these. Well, at least space and power. With over 100,000 cores, without an efficient (dense) packaging you'll need a room way too big. And a dense packaging leads to all kind of heat issues, so you have to be power-efficient.

It would hurt both the GPU and the CPU performance. Maybe not in the same way, but still.

Plus the article complaining about the use of GPUs is stupid. GPUs can be and are used to solve real scientific problems. They are not as easy to efficiently use as the CPUs, but they are almost as versatile.

Even with an hypothetical hyper-fast network, 100.000 android phones won't get you anywhere near the top of the list.

Heck, even 100 000 Nehalem (core i7) cores won't get you in the top 5.

So, android phones ? You'll need millions of them.

Well, the diesels winning in Le Mans are not slow, but they are certainly very noisy and insanely expensive to buy and repair.

Well, mine is absolutely completely dead, and has been sitting in a drawer for years. But my laptop runs fine without it. I just have to use suspend-to-disk when going from one AC outlet to another.

No, you cannot.

Do you know that the laser used to measure the distance between the earth and the moon has a radius of over 6km when it reaches the moon, and that only one photon every few seconds comes back to the detector on earth ?

Considering how far the spaceship will be from earth, it is not even remotely possible to focus a beam precisely enough to transfer energy.

They must have the CIP module !

My bet is that this is a typo.
1.6 PB seems more reasonable.