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Super computers
A tid bit that was forwarded to me.
Kelly
>
> Intel has recently been commissioned to build a teraflops machine. A
> teraflop is one trillion floating-point operations per second. In the
> passage above Moravec is talking about `10 teraops' which refers to
> trillions of `operations' per second. Moravec's notion of an operation is
> somewhat complicated. He speaks of `50 bits of surprise for each
operation'.
> The Intel machine will use more than 9000 Pentium Pro microprocessors
> connected in a `two-and-a-half dimensional' mesh. The machine would achieve
> roughly one tenth of the benchmark machine Moravec suggests - if he thinks
> its operations are flexible enough.
>
> The URLs http://www.ssd.intel.com/success/hpcwire1.html and
> http://www.ssd.intel.com/tflop.html present some background information
from
> Intel on the teraflops machine project.
>
> Beyond a teraflop machine (10^12 floating point operations per second)
there
> is a petaflop machine (10^15 floating point operations per second). There
> is a page about `Petaflops Computing' in Wired, February 1996, on page 64.
> The URL http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/petaflops/peta.html has some
information
> and pointers.
>
> Of course, even if Moravec is right one must still come up with the right
> computer architecture and then one must figure out how to program it (or
> figure out how to get it to program itself.)
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Kelly Starks Internet: kgstar@most.fw.hac.com
Sr. Systems Engineer
Magnavox Electronic Systems Company
(Magnavox URL: http://www.fw.hac.com/external.html)
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