Now that it’s not the done thing for the superpowers to explode nuclear weapons for testing purposes in somebody else’s backyard, Uncle Sam is handing over large dollops of taxpayers money to domestic IT companies to develop systems that can simulate explosions of mind-boggling proportions. If the Department of Energy’s $50m Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative ASCI program leads to the creation of a 100 TFLOPS computer, as the project demands, then the US could also win back bragging rights from the Japanese for having created the world’s fastest computer. DEC and Sun Microsystems Inc are newly announced partners to ASCI’s PathForward simulation initiative; IBM Corp and Silicon Graphics Inc already working on the project. This week the Clinton administration awarded $5m to SGI and $11m to DEC to help them develop interconnect architectures which can be used to harness the power of hundreds or thousands of nodes in a single virtual system. DEC will develop Quadrics Supercomputing World Ltd’s high speed bus interconnect (CI No 3,315), to connect 256 AlphaServer nodes. SGI will add the $5m to what it’s already spending on its Spider – Scalable Pipelined Interconnect for Distributed Endpoint Routing – interconnect which uses the High Performance Parallel Interface (HIPPI) to transfer data at rates of 800Mbps between nodes in each direction. SGI, which is using Spider as the basis of its commercial ccNUMA server technology, says the technology could be used in future routers, switches, communication links, channels and interconnects. ASCI requires technology development it has funded since 1996 to be carried forward into commercial products – Donkey Kong Nuclear Devices perhaps? Intel Corp’s already delivered ASCI a 1 TFLOP system, IBM will deliver a 3 TFLOPS SP-based system – ASCI Blue – in 1999. A100 TFLOPS machine is due in 2004. SGI claims a further round of funding will mandate the use of some of its technology by other PathForward participants.
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