🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <33B3560A.B0A352E1@home.now>, badbri  <here@home.now> wrote:
>Jester wrote:
>> Chris Leung (Grge...@silcon.com) wrote:
>> : Isn't the fastest computer right now the Omega Red.. the Pentagon
>> has it.
>> : Consisting of 2 terrabytes of storage and LOTs of PPros...?
>>
>> According to PC Magazine (and on campus rumour), Prof. John MacDonald
>> here at RPI was given a $1 million grant from the DoD to build a
>> supercomputer
>> based off of his fast RISC design (supposedly able to reach 16Ghz on
>> each
>> chip).  They said that this would smoke the parallel PPro machines by
>> many
>> hundreds oftimes over.
>Definately a UNIX machine.

Tera Computer, here in Seattle, has been working on what they hoped
would be the first teraFLOPS computer for quite a while. (Dunno if
that PPro lashup has reached the teraflop mark --- wasn't that 1.2 TIPS?)
The architecture sounds quite nice, each processor ( = many execution
units) handles several threads simultaneously, so that context switches
and memory traffic are essentially free. Or so their marketing people
claim. Apparently some kinds of finite element simulations require
*very* tightly coupled systems to get all the parallellism you'd expect.

OTOH, a 16 GHz RISC box sounds nice too ... if possibly a little
dangerous if the case comes loose ...

-- 
             Wim Lewis * wi...@hhhh.org * Seattle, WA, USA
    PGP 0x27F772C1: 0C 0D 10 D5 FC 73 D1 35  26 46 42 9E DC 6E 0A 88