Skynet or Colossus (depending on your age and reading predilections) just around the corner?
Or Data from ST:TNG?
The NSA undoubtedly has a few that make these look weak.
I’m glad we’re going back in this direction. Supercomputers based on GPUs shouldn’t apply because they can’t be compared to others. GPUs can only do a limited set of operations — they do what they do very fast, but can’t do anything outside of that. They can’t be called general-purpose supercomputers.
If you want to take this to the logical extreme, we could design a chip that only does LINPACK, the Top 500 benchmark program, but does it very fast (basically, implement all of LINPACK in hardware). We could easily blow even this supercomputer away for a relatively small amount of money. We’d be at #1, but the computer would be useless for anything else. Of course it would be disallowed, but it is only further on the same road as a GPU supercomputer.
People have been playing around with this idea for years using FPGAs, so imagine a custom-fabbed multi-core LINPACK chip at 45 nm running at 3 GHz. The EFF had custom DES cracking chips made for an encryption breaking contest back in the 90s. Its 1900 chips with 24 DES crunchers each could exhaust the DES 56 keyspace in nine days (over 90 billion keys per second), while tens of thousands of PCs took months to do the same thing.