New Supercomputer at Caltech Ranks as the World’s Fastest
The world’s fastest computer--which can perform 8.6 billion calculations per second--was unveiled Friday at Caltech in Pasadena by scientists eager to begin using it to study projects ranging from depletion of the ozone layer to the aerodynamics of high-speed aircraft.
Called the Touchstone Delta system, the computer uses 528 high-speed microprocessors, linked through a communications network, to break problems into small parts and process them in short order.
Just one of the processors can add the numbers in a telephone directory within 1/100th of one second, said Roy Williams, a Caltech scientist who will use the supercomputer for physics research.
Officials of Intel Corp., which built the supercomputer, said it is a prototype for the firm’s next generation of supercomputers. Intel, which for years had a virtual monopoly on making chips for personal computers, is expanding into high-performance computing and is one of eight firms worldwide--seven are from the United States--that now build supercomputers.
On Friday, dozens of scientists and representatives from the 13 research institutes, government labs and agencies that make up the Concurrent Supercomputing Consortium crowded into a Caltech laboratory. The consortium commissioned the building of the supercomputer.
The 16-foot-long object of everyone’s attention stood mutely in the room’s center, covered in black plexiglass and pulsing with rapid-fire red, green and yellow lights. Standing five feet high and three feet deep and divided into nine segments, Touchstone Delta evoked images of some futuristic video game, or a cubist, cyber-punk sculpture.
After lining up contributions of between $200,000 to $2 million from consortium members--including Caltech, NASA, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory--Intel plunged into design, enlisting the help of 100 scientists and engineers.
Robert Rockwell, a general manager at Intel, says competitors will soon come up with an even faster model. Touchstone Delta, in turn, breaks a speed record set in March by Thinking Machines Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., whose supercomputer calculated 5.2 billion operations per second.
“If you come back here in a month the researchers will tell you, ‘It (Touchstone Delta) is not fast enough. If we only had more power we could solve problems faster,’ ” Rockwell said.
Within several years, scientists say they hope to design a computer that can make a trillion calculations per second. But for now, consortium members--all but three of which are government labs or agencies--say this will do just fine.
“From our point of view it’s great,” said Stephen Squires, director of the computing systems technical office for DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which will use the computer to solve problems that could have defense application.
“You wouldn’t want to sell it to any country that could be a threat to you,” mused Tom Kintz, Intel’s manager for the Delta Project. Of course, “If you don’t have the scientists to run it, it’s not going to do you any good,” he added.
