At my university we have a Dell supercomputer for doing CFD (computational fluid dynamics) and it has 25 nodes with 2 dual core Xeons and 8gb in each node
That's 50 processors (100 cores) and 200gb ram Still takes ages for a simulation apparently though...I haven't used it yet but should be working with it next year.
well the bottleneck there is the network latency, even if they are on a closed network. that machine has all of that stuff connected together locally, so it would probably be faster in some respects.