jww@bonnie.UUCP (Joel West) (05/03/85)
It appears parallel-processing has appeared on the big time: Wall Street Journal (Riverside, Calif. edition) May 3, 1985, p.6: "Two Firms Unveil Computer Linking Many Processors" Two Boston-area companies separately unveiled laboratory version of computers that link many processors, or control chips, to achieve operating speeds many times faster than conventional machines. ...[Bolt Beranek & Newman Inc. and Thinking Machines Corp.] said their machines were developed with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency....[BBN] said it has contracts totalling about $20 million to deliver 10 of its systems to the agency. The two new machines are entries in the race among dozens of companies and academic researchers to develop "parallel- processing" computers. One company, Intel Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif., plans to ship a parallel-processor computer in June.... [BBN] said the largest version of its machine, called the Butterfly, uses 128 Motorola Inc. 68000 chips and can process 60 million instructions per second... Thinking Machines said a preliminary version of its Connection machine employs 1,000 recently designed chips, each containing 16 processors, to handle as many as 250 MIPS. The largest, $520,000 version of Intel's parallel-processor computer, the IPSC, incorporates 128 processors and has a top speed of about 100 MIPS. The internal structures of the three machines are somwhat different, but their speeds appear to put them on par with supercomputers such as Cray Research Inc.'s $6 million XMP machine. However, a Cray spokesman said comparisons are meaningless because factors other than instruction-handling speed determine how fast a computer works. Daniel Hillis, the 28-year-old architect of Thinking Machines' Connection machine, said his company has a $3 million contract with [DARPA] to deliver by year-end a parallel-processor computer using 64,000 processors that could handle one billion instructions a second... -- Joel West (619) 457-9681 CACI, Inc. - Federal 3344 N. Torrey Pines Ct La Jolla 92037 jww@bonnie.UUCP (ihnp4!bonnie!jww) westjw@nosc.ARPA "The best is the enemy of the good" - A. Mullarney