In 1997, the fastest supercomputer in the world was Intel's ASCI Red. It was the first supercomputer to break 1 TFLOP. It consumed 850 kW and had 1,212 gigabytes of memory and cost $46 million.
Today a home computer could beat it for under $15,000 and consume less than 1 kW.
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In terms of linear algebra TFLOPs one easily beat it with GPUs by I think a factor 10 and under 1K but 1 TB of memory is still rather expensive.
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64GB DIMMs have fallen near or under $300 now so theoretically you could do 16 of those for ~ $5k.
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In practice, you need to fit them on a single motherboard and this might get more expensive. Probably doable for 15K, but roughly half of the cost is gonna be memory, where as compute as I said will be 10-100x TFLOPs (if I do my math right :-)
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