(Related) Other supercomputing news.. (fwd)

[Bob Glamm]

    On Tue, 15 Jun 1999, Brian Dobbins wrote:

    > 
    > Future Beowulf hardware, too..?
    > 
    >   CNN has an article I just caught about a 'hypercomputer', boasting power
    > about 60,000 times that of a 350MHz Pentium.  Sounds ridiculous,
    > especially for $1000, but hey, it's on CNN, it -can't- be wrong.. right?!
    > :)

    As the late Carl Sagan would say "Incredible claims require incredible
    evidence" (Or something to that effect). Having browsed the webpage
    before, I found that of the three people mentioned, only one
    seems to have a technical background.  None seem to have any experience
    in super-computing. (Nor does the company have an email address that
    I could find.  I wanted to send them a code to benchmark.)

    I believe the correct word to describe these types of announcements is
    "piffle".

    Doug

I heard of these guys awhile back and posted a heat & power analysis of their
system on Slashdot.  If you thought Merced was hot, the biggest computer
they mentioned with all those FPGAs in it I figured would take somewhere
in the megawatt range to power it (and a significant fraction of that
would go to heat dissipation).  Oh, for those interested I assumed
the latest 200MHz Xilinx FPGA parts and 5W heat dissipation per chip..

These people must have one hell of a PR firm though.  A month after
I heard about it in the first place they were in Forbes (then the
CNN article a week later).  I guess CNN and Forbes should be in the
market for an engineering "fact checker"... ;)

So, if product quality is inversely proportional to how well your
PR firm does, then Transmeta must be doing something incredibly cool.. ;)

-Bob