Supercomputer Advancement Slows?

kgeiger writes "In the Feb. 2011 issue of IEEE Spectrum online, Peter Kogge, an IEEE Fellow and professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame, outlines why we won't see exaflops computers soon. To start with, consuming 67 MW (an optimistic estimate) is going to make a lot of heat. He concludes, 'So don't expect to see a supercomputer capable of a quintillion operations per second appear anytime soon. But don't give up hope, either. [...] As long as the problem at hand can be split up into separate parts that can be solved independently, a colossal amount of computing power could be assembled similar to how cloud computing works now. Such a strategy could allow a virtual exaflops supercomputer to emerge. It wouldn't be what DARPA asked for in 2007, but for some tasks, it could serve just fine.'"

A virtual cloud based super computer?

[Yaos]

Why has nobody tried this before? They could easily plow through the data from SETI, fold proteins, or even have a platform for creating and distributing cloud based computing turnkey computing solutions! It's too bad that the cloud was not invented until a year or two ago, this stuff could have probably started out in 1999 if the cloud existed back then.