Although my roots before joining Microsoft were in supercomputing, I believe that "extreme computing" and adding gigaflops (billions of floating-point operations per second) are no longer the optimal solutions to most scientific and technical problems. Today, scientists and engineers can buy or build 10-gigaflop desktop computers for around $5,000, and within the next several years, we will see similar supercomputing power at the chip level.

Select from the choices above to read the entire article.