AlexNet (2012) ☆

Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton halved the ImageNet error rate with a convolutional network trained on two consumer NVIDIA GTX 580s — the moment that proved GPUs + data + depth beats hand-engineering, redirected the field, and incidentally set NVIDIA on its current path. Every GPU cluster in this database descends from that dorm-room-scale rig.