Four times the runner-up's performance
Not entirely sure of the numbers, they seem to dance. Tangentially, GFLOPS comparisons proved elusive, when asked of a nearby search engine. Must be the hour, I'm sure.
Disagree that not any single company could buy and operate such a thing. The price tag is what, 1.2mrd and 10mio per year? Several companies are sitting on piles of cash big enough to build a dozen of these things. Apple, for one. They could do it more easily than the US government, even (not counting the uncountable black ops budgets). Of course, few companies would do it just for the heck of it, and then nobody else would get to play with it. So that's where you need government, or something else to manage a shared resource. But that's a problem of distributing utility.
And then the salespitch. Of course. Though much of the trouble with them nukular reactors and the tsunami appears to've been simple negligence and corruption. Emergency generators not quite secured enough, just the wrong interconnects available, been pointed out for ages but ignored by officials, that sort of thing. Spendy supers aren't going to help against that. Even so.
What would be more interesting perhaps is figuring out if it'd make sense for, say, amazon to deploy one of these things, instead of a comparable number of cpus in commodity boxes currently in their datacentres. The big difference is that they're going for rock-bottom cost, not so much for interconnect speed. The latter is the big selling point of the K computer and it's not something amazon tends to sell. Might it be? Discuss.