[Beowulf] Quasi-Non-Von-Neumann hardware in a Beowulf

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 04:22:39PM -0800, David Mathog wrote:
> "Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy.duke.edu> wrote
> 
> > A $30 PCI-bus card that does nothing but generate super-high-quality
> > random numbers (uniform deviates of various widths and/or ints of
> > various widths) at high speed (faster than the CPU can, which means say
> > 50 megarands/second or better) and deliver them directly to memory
> > without the CPUs help (so one can build a circular queue and keep it
> > full with only occasional calls requesting the next block of rands)
> > would be a Great Boon to Monte Carlo-heads like myself.
> 
> I've often thought the same.  The thing is, it doesn't have to be
> pseudorandom numbers, it can be real random numbers generated

Some can do both.

http://www.via.com.tw/en/initiatives/padlock/hardware.jsp

Unfortunately, the VIA CPUs are otherwise next to useless for numerics.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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