1 terabit = 125 gigabytes. Since 200 gigabyte hard drives are being retailed we are already there and beyond for home PCs. In fact, handheld PDAs are now as powerful as my desktop which is only 4 years old. Before I upgrade I'm hoping something like this will be affordable, maybe even solar powered:

In spite of miniaturization of circuits modern supercomputers are much larger than those built in the 60s and 70s. In 2000 IBM announced the ASCII White supercomputers that incorporates up to 6 terabytes of memory (RAM, not hard drive memory) and was delivered on 28 tractor trailor trucks.

But now it is the year 2004, and ASCII White has slipped to 8th place in the list of world's fastest supercomputers. The fastest now is Japan's Earth Simulator, completed in Feb. 2002. It incorporates 40 Teraflops of processing power, with 10 Terabytes of RAM, 230 Terabytes for user hard drives, and 460 Terabytes for working hard drives. It has 5000 processing chips, each loaded with 60 million transistors performing at 8 gigaflops. Each chip consumes 140 Watts of electricity for a grand total of 700 kilowatts. And that's just the chips!

The Earth Simulator supercomputer processor modules are loaded into 320 upright cabinets in a specially constructed warehouse-sized building approx. 164 ft x 213 ft x 56 ft., seismically isolated, with a powerful air conditioning system, lightning protection, and steel-plated RFI shielding as pictured below:

<img src="http://www.es.jamstec.go.jp/esc/eng/GC/b_photo/esc11.jpg";