At 10:00 AM 9/29/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
(Hoist by their own petards indeed! Don't tell our Russian what petard means.)
Uh, wasn't that the name of the bald captain on Star Trek Next Generation? You know, "Jean-Luc Petard"?
The word is petaflops, computer jargon for 1000 trillion computations per second. Think of it as a year's labor for a powerful workstation compressed into 30 seconds. Think of it, also, as 1000 times the speed of the current computing benchmark, a trillion operations a second -- teraflops -- which is on the
...
I doubt this will be ever be built, at least not as a government-funded "G-job" "one-off" machine. It would, as the full article state, necessitate a kind of "Apollo program" for supercomputers.
Check out an article in about the September issue of Scientific American, 1966, on the subject of the Illiac IV, which was one of the first attempts at a multiprocessor machine. Originally it was conceived as a 256-processor unit, at 4 million (floating point?) operations per second per processor which would have been 1 giga ops per second, but it was eventually built as a 64-processor unit and turned on in about 1972 or so. The succeeding factor-of-1000 improvement appears (if the item above is accurate) to have taken 24 years to accomplish, so it's hard to imagine that the next factor of 1000 will arrive appreciably sooner than year 2020.
The reasons for the collapse of the market are well-known: the end of communism has lessened certain needs, the cut-backs in defense spending, "the attack of the killer micros" (arrays of cheap micros give better bang-for-the-buck), and, related to the themes of this list, NSA's code-breaking just ain't what it used to be.
Oddly enough, however, we're getting somewhat of an echo of the "big single processor" phenomenon with the micros. We all know that in supercomputers, multiprocessors won out over single processors, and mainframes were just about defeated by microcomputers. Yet a look at Intel's pricing for Pentiums shows that they sell a 120-MHz chip for about $135, while they sell a 200-megahertz version for around $550 or so. Arithmetic suggests that a person would be far better off with a 4-120-MHz-processor Pentium (cumulative clock rate 480 MHz) than a single, 200-megahertz version. (admittedly, peripheral logic costs will adjust this a little.) Of course, this would also leave Intel flat on its ass attempting to compete with AMD, Cyrix, etc, because a somewhat higher speed per cpu is just about the only advantage they have. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com