Yea, my school (UF) didn't have a 'you must take an engineering course every semester' requirement, but some classes did have pre-requisite courses so if you missed a semester you could get yourself in to a crunch at the end.

Most people would do their study-abroad as a summer program, take care of some random electives (language and history requirements were the favorites) and then not have 'lost' any time in their yearly progression.

You seem to be jumping to conclusions - or perhaps that was a really weak anti-America troll? Hard to tell on the internet...

I'm going to give sbilstein the benefit of the doubt and assume that he isn't asking 'Are there any schools outside of the US that aren't incompetent', but rather asking the more important question 'There are many universities outside of the US, does anyone have any experience with one that participates in 'study-abroad' programs and has some sort of technical course available?'.

The majority of study-abroad programs that were available when I was still in college were focused on history/language/art. Those were the things that made more sense to study of course - go to France to learn about French history, go to Spain to learn about Spanish art, etc. The only science courses I remember seeing were for biology in Australia. Now this was a decade ago, when most of our information was through pamphlets and presentations on campus so maybe there were some places that did 'technical' stuff but without a huge internet presence it was hard to find.

As was already mentioned, 'scalable' doesn't mean 'already at max scale' it means that they have the ability to increase the size of the cluster easily. And as far as Top500 goes, you don't need 10k cores to get on the list. Lower on the list (like 450-500) you'll find machines with under a thousand dual-core Xeon 5100 Woodcrests.