processor speeds keep rising dramatically - at approximately 75% per year. Issue widths rise. dram speeds increase at a steady, paltry 7% per year | sally mckee, reflections on the memory wall, 2004

market

2007: NAND flash will ship more MB in one year than DRAMs have since t=0...~1.6 x 10¹⁸ bytes

NAND price in January 2007 was $8.52/GB, down from $150/GB in three years | denali

industry united at darpa for its high productivity computing system, already in phase III, they say: in this episode: ibm and cray and their petascale storage systems.

Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to calculate more than one quadrillion floating point operations per second.... | enterprise storage

last year sun+carnegi mellon already published their report on ultra large scale systems.

short time ago a chap told me: we may have to many of it already as you'll seldom hear these days: i am runnning out of memory.

truly you miss something, if you just listen to historians and don't consider that memory may be dynamic, associative and even transactional:

TM (transactional memory) provides a new concurrency-control construct that avoids the pitfalls of locks and significantly eases concurrent programming. It brings to mainstream parallel programming proven concurrency-control concepts used for decades by the database community. Transactional-language constructs are easy to use and can lead to programs that scale. | queue, unlocking concurrency

update: critizism on that approach by patrick logan

also worth reading a conversation with john hennessy and david patterson, the authors of the fat, heavy weight book: computer architecture: a quantitative approach.