No kidding - Seymour may be rolling in his grave over having his name attached to anything massively parallel. His entire design philosophy was to have just a few uber processors cranked up as fast as possible, although I wonder if by now he'd have changed his mind. Multiple processor servers were expensive when he passed away and the multiple core race we have going on now wasn't even fantasy.
The number of processors isn't the issue. The degree of connectivity is the issue, and IBM, Cray, and Seymour would all get it, even if the current "Cray" and UIUC aren't going to admit it. This version of Blue Waters is just another in a long line of massively parallel jokes. The version of Blue Waters proposed and abandoned by IBM would have been worth talking about.
Flops are nearly free. Connectivity is expensive. That's why flops, irrelevant though they may be, are advertised.
There's this bizarre belief being stated by some of the skeptics on this particular article that somehow knowing the end of a process, but not the beginning, is in some way superior to knowing the beginning, but not the end.
The belief is far from bizarre. It is rooted in this poorly-understood phenomenon called entropy. Being able to posit an orderly beginning that is consistent with the observable and relatively chaotic present is far more meaningful than extrapolating into an unobservable future using equations with iffy and actually unknown stability properties.
In the sciences, we are now uniquely priviledged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand. -- Gerald Holton