According to the Top 500 list of supercomputers that was published by industry researchers, the Jaguar supercomputer by Cray is the fastest in the planet. This is the first time that Jaguar actually beat IBM’s Roadrunner in terms of performance, achieving about 2 million billion calculations per second. But a deeper look at the said list suggests that the trend in supercomputing shows not only of faster machines but a constant erosion of how the industry has been performing. The industry has seen how dedicated vendors like SiCortex and venerable players such as SGI either being shut down or getting acquired after filing for bankruptcy.Interestingly, many of the components of supercomputers - from the processors to the networking cables used - are actually the same as those that are used for everyday corporate computing and hosting services. The number of processors that are used to build supercomputers is constantly decreasing. As high-performance computers and supercomputers continue to use mainstream components, it becomes more difficult to identify the high-performance varieties from those used for corporate computing. Rackable which acquired SGI, builds products with the corporate consumer in mind. As the hardware for high-performance computers becomes more like the one used in corporate data centers, other technology providers such as Microsoft are tapping into the familiar architecture to address the demands.And because supercomputers are also becoming… well, less super, their accessibility has also increased. Microsoft, Rackable, Intel and other firms are already out to take advantage of the trends. But as the industry continues to come out with machines that are capable of exascale performance, it’s unclear if these products and other common architectures can even linearly scale out without using up a lot of space and energy.