top 500 computers

Here is an interesting quotation from the home page of www.top500.org:

Matei Ripeanu has an interesting brief article [PDF] in IEEE Distributed Systems Online in which he analyzes the shape of the Top500 list of supercomputers.
Trends inferred from the fastest supercomputers lists for the last 13 years indicate that aggregating the computational power of relatively small machines is becoming increasingly rewarding. It is thus no coincidence that Grid computing, which provides the infrastructure to build these controlled, secure resource aggregations, continues to attract increasing interest.

I think this applies to distributed volunteer computing too.
Tullio