DISQUS

It doesn't seem like it would be hard to make it bootable. There are PCI based IDE and SATA adapters, which allow the devices they are attached to to be booted from. I suppose if it truly has a different setup than a normal drive, it might pose a problem, but what is the physical limitation on normal IDE/SATA? It is not a specification on the storage, just on the interface.

It makes perfect sense that the computer hardware industry is now racing towards low prices. Computers made by these companies are generally overpriced, compared to their components, and people do not need nearly as much computing power as they have now. The only real reason people keep buying new computers is because the increasingly bloated Windows OS slows anything more than a couple years old to a standstill. I have a feeling that either OS X or Linux will make the turnaround towards smaller devices much faster, unless Windows puts a lot of work into it.

Sounds awesome, but...

Isn't the PS3 (the 7-SPE Cell processor) capable of achieving almost a TFLOP by itself? Even though that is only with single-floating-point numbers, that is much cheaper... what would the difference be between this BlueGene supercomputer and a mere 30 or so PS3s? Not to mention if you added a powerful cooling system and overclocked them. In fact, I heard that the most powerful supercomputing cluster in history was in fact a collection of PS3s combined over the internet to achieve over 1 PFLOP, albeit with a extremely slow "system bus" (the internet).