What's helping the low end is the increasing use of GPUs(graphics processing unit), which cost less than CPUs (central processing unit) and are a good fit for simulations, modeling other high-performance uses.

Among the machines demonstrated at the supercomputing conference in Germany this week was one by U.K.-based Boston Ltd. that uses CPU and GPU processors (AMD's FireStream 9250), which will first be sold as a 1U rack but later as a desktop tower. It also reaches TFLOPS. Pricing wasn't immediately available.

What's most interesting is the increasing activity in low-end supercomputing, especially in language and architectures for supporting parallel environments that include GPU processors. OpenCL, initially developed by Apple Inc., was released late last year by . And Nvidia Corp.s .

But one limiter in the use of GPU/CPU-based systems isn't the hardware as much as it is "the progress people have made to date in porting various applications to GPUs," said Steve Conway, an HPC analyst at IDC.

Conway said he believes it will still be a few years before applications increase enough to broaden adoption. He expects that in five years applications will come of age, but for the immediate future the GPU will be much more a limited-purpose processor.