Stardate 20010811.0513 (On Screen): It's interesting how the state-of-the-art can create a technology niche that thrives, and then annihilate it in less than 30 years. The old Wang corporation became a giant creating customized (and expensive) word processing units, but got eaten from below by the PC. And in fact microprocessors have been slowly eating all other aspects of computing from below for a long time. There was a time when the "micro" in "microprocessor" referred to relative performance. Now all it refers to is physical size, power consumption and price (where low is
good). The fastest computer that IBM makes is based on a microprocessor. So the heyday of the traditional "super-computer" is over. These days, the most powerful computers are large arrays of standard off-the-shelf PC processors. While "Cray" used to be a name to conjure with, these days their computers are passé. The largest "computer" in existence now is the distributed
SETI@HOME system, which easily dwarfs anything else in existence. The
Cray SV1, lauded in this article, is 4.8 GFLOPS, but SETI@HOME right now is 22,000 GFLOPS. And though the first Cray's were sold to places like Los Alamos for nuclear weapons research, these days when those places need huge amounts of number crunching they build
big arrays of microprocessors (and run Linux on them).
(discuss)
