RACING TO BE THE MOST COMPUTER
Aren’t supercomputers super enough? The
answer, according to both users and vendors, is
a firm “ no”. As fast as the state-of-the art
machines are, there is no shortage of
applications capable of bogging them down.
Weather simulations, for example, involve
calculating conditions at each node of a grid laid
over the area of interest. Current systems
placed the nodes 60 mile apart far enough to
hide a thunderstorm between nodes-and
halving that distance would take 10 times as
long. Engineers aren’t much better off: “They’ re
always looking for more computing power, “
complains Paul Muzio, computing technology
manager at Grumman Aerospace, Bethpage,
NY.
To meet these demand, supercomputer
vendors in US and Japan are competing
feverishly to get faster machines off the
drawing board and into production. The
contestants are blostered by funds from
government agencies and industry associatin
that will spill into the billion dollars.
The task will require every penny.
Current machines push silicon chip technology
to the limit, forcing researchers to look at new
techniques to help squeeze out additional
operations per seconds. Cray Research in
Minneapolis, for example is experimenting with
gallium arsenide chips as a potential
replacement for silicon technology, while ETA
Systems (Control Data’s supercomputer spin-
off) is turning to CMOS (Complementary metal
oxide semiconductor) chips. All manufacturers
are incorporating parallel processing and
pipelining, in which basic instruction, memory
and I/O routines are performed
simultaneously.
No one is ready to predict a Winner
super-computer race Japan is clearly prepared,
however, to give US vendors a run for the
money. Its Ministry of Internal Trade & Industry
(MITI) has committed one –half billions dollars
through 1990 for the development of a10 –
billion - operations – per-second (bops)
machine. Early results seem impressive: Fujitsu
has built a 500 million – operation- per – second
(Mops) Compouter: Hitachi 630 mops machine:
and NEC plans to have a 1300 mops
supercomputers out next year.
Some Japanese super computers are
said to be software-compatible with IBM
mainframe, potentially a devastating
advantage. But most observers assert that even
if this were true, IBM software would not run
much faster on these machine than it would so
an IBM mainframe: the peak processing speeds
are still reserved to numerical application.
It may be some time before these
claims can be sorted out. So far, only Fujitsu has
expressed interest in marketing
supercomputers in the US, where Amdahl will
probably distribute the Fujitsu Machine.