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IP: world's fastest computer
From: David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Fri, 09 May 1997 17:49:52 -0400
from http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/news/trends/t970509b.htm: The Fastest Computer Going Defense ponies up over $1 million for 16-GHz computer. (5/9/97) -- A few months ago, Intel's supercomputer center made national news for building the fastest computer in existence: a supercomputer capable of 1 trillion operations a second. Now, the U. S. Department of Defense has handed a professor a $1 million grant to build a 16-GHz supercomputer 1,000 times as fast as Intel's. John F. McDonald--a Rensselaer professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering--has won a three-year, $1,369,000 contract from the federal Defense Projects Research Agency (DARPA) to build a supercomputer that uses a 16-GHz clock. Defense wants McDonald to build a "PetaOps" supercomputer (1,000 trillion operations per second), which would dwarf any existing computer's performance. McDonald is planning a design for an 8-way superscalar architecture with a 16-GHz clock that could reach 128 billion operations per second. By lashing eight of these designs together, he expects to approach the speed of the DARPA-specified machine. Such a plan calls for radical approaches to cooling the computer, in addition to presenting other technical challenges. Mainframe Design Back in Vogue McDonald's design is based on heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs), which are related to homojunction bipolar transistors, on which mainframe computers were once built. The computer industry has abandoned this technology in favor of CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) transistors, but McDonald claims that as transistors shrink to submicron sizes, HBTs will be back in vogue, ushering in the fastest computing speeds ever. "Extending CMOS-only technology to build a PetaOps computer would require networking more than a million Pentium chips," he says. Intel's supercomputer networks 10,000 Pentium Pro systems into a parallel computer. The machine is already being used for large-scale simulations, such as those showing the impact a nuclear explosion or a large meteorite would have on Earth. Professor McDonald's 16-GHz supercomputer would be 1,000 times as fast as Intel's machine. What would a 16-GHz supercomputer be used for? The answer: more simulations. Defense plans to simulate battles for training soldiers and to simulate the environmental effects of natural disasters. Scientists have also said that such speeds could help unravel the human genome and improve the accuracy of weather predictions.--Sebastian Rupley
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