>With the development of storage area networks and server farms of thousands of servers,
>by the year 2000 the minicomputer had all but disappeared, and mainframes were largely
>restricted to specialised uses. The Google server farm is thought to be the largest,
>with a total calculation rate three times that of Earth Simulator or Blue Gene, as of 2004.

This is bull-shit. Mainframe is still IBM's most profitable branch (literally billions of dollars earned), because banks and governments would never accept the inherent unreliability of PC-farms. Also, PC based clusters simply cannot have the vast I/O performance, traditional to mainframes, which these big brothers require. Without tremendous I/O bandwidht (e.g. serve 15,000 interactive users and six fully loaded ATM circuits at the same time) the CPU power is of little real-world use.