Marshall Brain's Blog

This article talks about the world's biggest supercomputers, and specifically is about the 3,300-processor cluster at Weta Digital:

When hi-tech meets high fantasy

The big three, according to the article, are:

• Los Alamos National Laboratory's supercomputer (8,192 processors)
• Japanese Earth Simulator (5,120 processors)
• Weta Digital (3,300 processors)

Why doesn't Google make it onto this list? Estimates of its computing power go as high as 100,000 processors. For example, the NYTimes reports that Google: "consists of more than 54,000 servers designed by google engineers from basic components. It contains about 100,000 processors and 261,000 disks." Anyone know?

The 261,000 disks is also impressive. If you assume they average 50 gigabytes in size, it means that Google has over 13 petabytes of disk space (13,000 terabytes).