There once was a time when supercomputers were made of different stuff than ordinary machines. The original Cray 1 was handcrafted from exotic chips mounted on copper-plated, liquid-cooled circuit boards. The Cray 2 looked even stranger. It bubbled in a bath of fluoro-carbon fluid — cooled by artificial blood. Parallel computing changed all that. Now the fastest machines in the world are made of the same components as PCs and workstations. Supercomputers just use more of them. The truth is, given the current trends in technology, the distinction between supercomputers and other computers is beginning to blur.
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