Around a decade ago just around 100 or so facilities could justify the expense of a supercomputer. Nowadays their is a real need for them for as prices
are falling enough where it could provide ROI easily in today’s demand of data analysis.
Apparently Cray has a low cost supercomputer, the Cray XC-30AC priced around 500,000 starting which is way less than the typical 10-30 million dollar price tag of the XC-30 version.