best price/performance ratio? (Score 1)

As has already been pointed out, KASY0 has better price/performance on Linpack. Also, the Space Simulator at Los Alamos was built over a year ago from Intel P4 hardware, and is currently listed at #88 on the TOP500 list, so it certainly qualifies as a supercomputer. It acheived 757.1 Gflops on Linpack, and cost $484,000 in September 2002. So, that's works out to a Linpack Tflop per 1.56 million, vs the current (improved) result of 8.2 Tflops/5.2 million, or 1.58. So, the cluster price/performance is about the same between the brand new G5 Big Mac hardware, and year-old Intel P4 hardware.

The cluster is certainly an important milestone, though. The days of being locked in to buying a commercial architecture that was designed three years ago and costs 10x too much are over.