IP: world's fastest computer

[David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

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