Is KASY0 really the first supercomputer under $100/GFLOPS?
To the best of our knowledge, KASY0’s claim is unchallenged for a general-purpose supercomputer. The closest price/performance competitor is probably this $50,000+ system built by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) using 70 PlayStation2 units… which, using theoretical peak speed, would be about $110/GFLOPS using single-precision. In contrast, KASY0’s theoretical peak speed is slightly more than 3X better, at just over $37/GFLOPS; using 64/80-bit precision, KASY0’s peak is better than $75/GFLOPS. On a single-precision version of HPL, KASY0’s measured performance yields better than $84/GFLOPS. Although KASY0 was not complete until after the paper submission deadline for a 2003 Gordon Bell Award, we submitted a paper that described the technology that makes KASY0 so cost-effective and indicated in the paper that more detailed results would be added before the final paper was due. Unfortunately, the paper without the detailed results was rejected from SC03. It is
