(Related) Other supercomputing news.. (fwd)

[Alvin Starr]

On Wed, 16 Jun 1999, Bob Glamm wrote:

> 
>     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?!
>     > :)
[snip snip]
> 
> 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.. ;)

Way back in the dark ages(19-20 years ago) I worked for a computer company
that was aproached by a fellow from the UK who had a novel compression
system. He could take any data and compress it by a guarenteed 25%. Now
there are those who would say that 40% is no great compression. But since
this was guarenteed you could take the results and recompress them to get
another 40%! This was all based on some research done for the UK defense
departmant people on encryption with large prime numbers. The whole scheme
had on one level a reasonable air to it. Enough that a number of large
computer companies were taken for a lot of money before this fellow
disappeared.

the more things change the more thay stay the same.

Alvin Starr                   ||   voice: (416)585-9971
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