That's why a Cray is more effeicient. You don't need 1100 CPUs to to get to the Super Computer range.
In any event, it's never the CPUs that are the bottlenecks, it's the I/O channels that always lag the CPU.

I'd be interested in seeing what type projects get approved for the CPU time.

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Cray's are also very expensive.

Virgina Tech built the G5 Tower cluster for around 5.25 million IIRC.

They also used infiniband for networking. This provides for far more bandwidth and much lower latency than even GigE.

Also the whole point of the cluster was to prove that G5's and Apple hardware can be used for large scale scientific computing purposes. Something for which I think the team over at VT did an excellent job of doing.