Chez Chesler

In late September, IBM announced that its new Blue Gene/L system was the world's fastest computer, at 36.01 teraflops (3.6 times 10^13 floating-point operations per second.)

Some four years after Moore's Law was formulated, I read in My Weekly Reader about some particularly large and powerful computer. At the time, "scientists" answered not the question When will computer hardware match the human brain? but instead how large such a computer would be. If I remember correctly, it would be as large as a gymnasium, and would consume enough power to light a small city. Moravec 1998 op. cit. suggests that a 100-MIPS robot is equivalent in intelligence to a housefly, and estimates 100 million MIPS (10 ^ 14 integer operations per second) for human intelligence -- I have no idea what those "scientists" used. (Moravec notes that wetware is much more adaptable to a variety of tasks; dedicated hardware has long been faster at particular tasks.)

In any case, what was the largest computer ever built? Not in processor speed or memory, but in units of volume and electric power, gymnasia and small cities?