Re: The Petaflops Boondoggle Computer (was PET_ard)

At 10:00 AM 9/29/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
>(Hoist by their own petards indeed! Don't tell our Russian what petard means.)

Uh, wasn't that the name of the bald captain on Star Trek Next Generation?  
You know, "Jean-Luc Petard"?

>>      The word is petaflops, computer jargon for 1000
>>      trillion computations per second. Think of it as a
>>      year's labor for a powerful workstation compressed
>>      into 30 seconds. Think of it, also, as 1000 times the
>>      speed of the current computing benchmark, a trillion
>>      operations a second --  teraflops -- which is on the
>...
>
>I doubt this will be ever be built, at least not as a government-funded
>"G-job" "one-off" machine. It would, as the full article state, necessitate
>a kind of "Apollo program" for supercomputers.

Check out an article in about the September issue of Scientific American, 
1966, on the subject of the Illiac IV, which was one of the first attempts 
at a multiprocessor machine.  Originally it was conceived as a 256-processor 
unit, at 4 million (floating point?) operations per second per processor 
which would have been 1 giga ops per second, but it was eventually built as 
a 64-processor unit and turned on in about 1972 or so.  The succeeding 
factor-of-1000 improvement appears (if the item above is accurate) to have 
taken  24 years to accomplish, so it's hard to imagine that the next factor 
of 1000 will arrive appreciably sooner than year 2020.


>The reasons for the collapse of the market are well-known: the end of
>communism has lessened certain needs, the cut-backs in defense spending,
>"the attack of the killer micros" (arrays of cheap micros give better
>bang-for-the-buck), and, related to the themes of this list, NSA's
>code-breaking just ain't what it used to be.

Oddly enough, however, we're getting somewhat of an echo of the "big single 
processor" phenomenon with the micros.  We all know that in supercomputers, 
multiprocessors won out over single processors, and mainframes were just 
about defeated by microcomputers. 

Yet a look at Intel's pricing for Pentiums shows that they sell a 120-MHz 
chip for about $135, while they sell a 200-megahertz version for around $550 
or so.   Arithmetic suggests that a person would be far better off with a 
4-120-MHz-processor Pentium (cumulative clock rate 480 MHz) than a single, 
200-megahertz version.  (admittedly, peripheral logic costs will adjust this 
a little.)   Of course, this would also leave Intel flat on its ass 
attempting to compete with AMD, Cyrix, etc, because a somewhat higher speed 
per cpu is just about the only advantage they have.

Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com

At 11:50 AM -0800 9/29/96, jim bell wrote:
>At 10:00 AM 9/29/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
>>(Hoist by their own petards indeed! Don't tell our Russian what petard
>>means.)
>
>Uh, wasn't that the name of the bald captain on Star Trek Next Generation?
>You know, "Jean-Luc Petard"?

Picard. To keep people out of suspense, "hoist by one's own petard" has one
etymology involving a lift-off by gaseous action (though the more
family-oriented dictionaries cite a petard as a French rocket of some sort,
ignoring the point that the name comes from this same gaseus emission).

>Check out an article in about the September issue of Scientific American,
>1966, on the subject of the Illiac IV, which was one of the first attempts
>at a multiprocessor machine.  Originally it was conceived as a 256-processor
>unit, at 4 million (floating point?) operations per second per processor
>which would have been 1 giga ops per second, but it was eventually built as
>a 64-processor unit and turned on in about 1972 or so.  The succeeding
>factor-of-1000 improvement appears (if the item above is accurate) to have
>taken  24 years to accomplish, so it's hard to imagine that the next factor
>of 1000 will arrive appreciably sooner than year 2020.

I agree. By the way, I knew some of the folks who worked on parts of the
Illiac-IV, which was still limping along as late as the late 70s (maybe
later). It suffered, as expected, from lack of robust software. Not a huge
incentive to write decent software when there's only a single machine!

(The Livermore S1 project was yet another such example. So was the CDC
Star, of approximately the same vintage as the Illiac.)


>Oddly enough, however, we're getting somewhat of an echo of the "big single
>processor" phenomenon with the micros.  We all know that in supercomputers,
>multiprocessors won out over single processors, and mainframes were just
>about defeated by microcomputers.
>
>Yet a look at Intel's pricing for Pentiums shows that they sell a 120-MHz
>chip for about $135, while they sell a 200-megahertz version for around $550
>or so.   Arithmetic suggests that a person would be far better off with a
>4-120-MHz-processor Pentium (cumulative clock rate 480 MHz) than a single,
>200-megahertz version.  (admittedly, peripheral logic costs will adjust this
>a little.)   Of course, this would also leave Intel flat on its ass
>attempting to compete with AMD, Cyrix, etc, because a somewhat higher speed
>per cpu is just about the only advantage they have.

Intel is having no problem at all competing with AMD and Cyrix! Both of
them are struggling---AMD just announced a layoff, and Cyrix is facing
financial troubles. Neither are able to make competitive parts, for reasons
I won't go into here, and neither are making the money they'll need to
compete in the future with Intel. (Intel has half a dozen billion-dollar
wafer fabs, running with extraordinarily high yields--so my sources tell me
:-})--and the more money they make, the more factories they build, the more
they learn about how to make 0.35 and 0.25 micron chips, etc.)

As to pricing, that's mostly a market issue. They charge what the market
will bear. As to why a 200 MHz chip sells for 3-4x what a 120 MHz chip
sells for, this is a matter of supply-and-demand and _system_ costs. When
someone is already spending, say, $2000 on a system, they'll usually pay an
extra $500 for a faster version. (Approximately. Again, the market is the
ultimate arbiter.)

Symmetric multiprocessing is available, but it's often much less hassle to
have a single CPU running at 200 MHz than to try games with multiple
processors (which means more PCB real estate, more sockets, more of other
things).

--Tim May

We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

The pathological liar "Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net> writes:

> At 11:50 AM -0800 9/29/96, jim bell wrote:
> >At 10:00 AM 9/29/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
> >>(Hoist by their own petards indeed! Don't tell our Russian what petard
> >>means.)
> >
> >Uh, wasn't that the name of the bald captain on Star Trek Next Generation?
> >You know, "Jean-Luc Petard"?
>
> Picard. To keep people out of suspense, "hoist by one's own petard" has one
> etymology involving a lift-off by gaseous action (though the more
> family-oriented dictionaries cite a petard as a French rocket of some sort,
> ignoring the point that the name comes from this same gaseus emission).

OK. Igor, petard is the explosive device that Timmy May likes to stick up
his rectum in order to dervie sexual pleasure. He should discuss it on his
favorite Usenet newsgroup, alt.sex.masturbation, and not on a crypto-related
mailing list.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps