As well as blowing its own trumpet, Littleton, Massachusetts-based Alliant Computer Systems Corp is also doing Intel Corp a great favour in its campaign to publicise benchmarks achieved by its 80860 RISC-based FX/2800 minisupercomputers: in its latest salvo, it says that the box, which sells for under $2m, exceeded 2 GFLOPS on a linear convolution software routine frequently used in seismic exploration and in a wide range of signal processing applications and which is usually run on a Cray Research Y-MP eight processor supercomputer that costs over $15m; Alliant says that on the convolution – used to process digital data acquired in oil exploration, radar and sonar signal processing, crystallography, communications, speech recognition and speech synthesis, satellite image enhancement, high definition television research, vibration analysis and weather prediction a 28 processor Alliant FX/2828 exceeded 2,145 MFLOPS, which compares with Cray’s published figure of 2,012 MFLOPS on a Cray Y-MP eight processor model, and the peak theoretical performance of 200 MFLOPS on a Convex C240 four-processor system.
