The look-and-feel of the TSUBAME machine is also aimed for the user just like a windows, Linuz or MacOSX PC. The idea is that this way it just blends in the normal computing environment. The TSUBAME is no a special difficult to to use machine, but the same system you already use for other purposes. For instance the TSUBAME is also used to make back-ups of students'a and researchers' PCs.

But TSUBAME is also a very good supercomputer too: It was the machine in Japan that was faster that the Earth Simulator. It did achieve this by an architecture that combines:

• Commodity PC Cluster
• Traditional FAT node supercomputer
• Internet and Grid services
• (Modern) commodity SIMD-vector accelerator

Even although it claimed the number 1 position in Japan from the Earth Simulator, NEC was actively involved in the development of TSUBAME. It led an industrial consortium consisting of NEC, SUN, AMD, ClearSpeed, CFS, Voltaire, and Novell. The system runs he NAREGI National Grid Initiative's middleware.

The TSUBAME system runs over 300 jos per day. About 90% of them are jobs using less than eight cpu's. However the small number of jobs that need more than 32 cpu's take up about 2/3 of the CPU usage.

The TSUBAME is also used in total 200 industry users by over 30 companies. They like this because they can use supercomputer power without having to actually buy a machine which is a huge investment.

The current TSUBAME system could be upgraded to 1 Petaflop/s with existing technology: it is just a matter of costs. However, it paves the wave to main stream petaflop/s computing. Satoshi Matsuoka expects this to happen somewhere in 2010. He has the vision that by 2016, TSUBAME wil have reached the Desktop.

And what aout 30 years from now? Skycrapers will be used as superocmputers: On teh outside thay will be covered whit smart new chips that work on solar Energy. So the building will be the computer by then.