No Subject

How much you want to bet that a first copy goes to virginia?

Patrick

> 
> NY Times, Sept 8, 1995.
> 
> 
> Intel Wins Contract to Develop World's Fastest
> Supercomputer
> 
> By Lawrence M. Fisher
> 
> 
> San Francisco, Sept. 7 -- The Intel Corporation said
> today that it had won a a contract from the Department of
> Energy to develop what it called the world's fastest
> supercomputer.
> 
> 
> The machine, to be built at an estimated cost of $45
> million, would use 9,000 of Intel's forthcoming P6
> microprocessors linked in a configuration known as
> massively parallel. In recent years, massively parallel
> computers using thousands of relatively inexpensive
> off-the-shelf chips have stolen the performance lead from
> traditional supercomputers like those made famous by Cray
> Research Inc., which use far fewer, but far more powerful
> processors.
> 
> 
> Intel said its new supercomputer would be the first to
> achieve the goal of calculating more than a trillion
> floating-point operations a second, known as a teraflop.
> The machine, to be kept at Sandia National Laboratories
> In Albuquerque, N.M., would be used by Department of
> Energy scientists to study a variety of complex problems,
> foremost among them nuclear weapons safety.
> 
> 
> "President Clinton is committed to ending underground
> nuclear testing," Victor Reis, Assistant Secretary for
> Energy Programs, said in a statement. "Computer
> simulation will be a principal means for insuring the
> safety, reliability and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear
> deterrent. We are embarking on a 10-year program to
> advance the state of high performance computing to meet
> national security objectives," he said. ...
> 
> 
> ------
> 
> 
> 
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Patrick Horgan writes:
> How much you want to bet that a first copy goes to virginia?

I'm not sure that the NSA actually would want machines on that scale
these days. Its probably a lot more economical to throw your money
into lots of much smaller machines and occassionally link them up via
networks. Unlike physics simulation problems, most crypto problems
don't involve tight communication between the parallel processors, so
the extra expense that the high speed buses represent would end up
being a waste.

Perry