One counter example (SIAM News December 99) is Akamai Technologies founded by MIT Computer Science theorist Tom Leighton and others
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Supports optimal mirror sites network topology to minimize Web Page access delays
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Nasdaq AKAM currently has market capitalization of $20 Billion
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Hardware trends reflect both commodity technology and commodity systems
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SGI/Cray declining in importance and
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Sun (leveraging commercial Enterprise Servers) gains as do
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PC/Workstation Clusters typically aimed at specialized applications
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e.g. Inktomi (market capitalization $10B) uses 100's of PC's to provide Web Search services
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Note Sun systems are "pure" Shared Memory and Inktomi are "pure" distributed memory showing architectural focus in two distinct areas with distributed memory mainly supporting specialized services
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