How far we've come in HPC.

GPUs represent a revolution in the way HPC will get done in the future, but something obvious but important needs to be said.

For $550, I can now buy a single graphics card that can do 2.4 TFlops single precision, and almost 1/2 TFlop in double precision. That's more floating point performance on a single card than existed in total on the entire planet in 1984, in either single or double precision, and about 100x over the performance of a desktop or laptop PC. Similar scaling is happening in other places (you can now buy a single TByte disk for $300). Moores Law is a wonderful thing.

But this has an important consequence: the Pandora's box of technology has not just been opened, but finally and irreversably shredded apart. Any attempt to prevent enemy or terrorist nations or mad supervillains from using computer technology is pointless. Any laptop, even from Frys, has more than enough power and memory to do the job, whatever job. Malevolence is not tempered or regulated by elegance or efficiency.