Cheap Chips Aid Move to Develop Supercomputers
Dow Jones, Monday, June 23, 2003 at 01:31
A movement to build powerful computers from inexpensive components is gaining ground, and new chips from Intel Corp. (INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) could accelerate the pace, Monday's Wall Street Journal reported.
According to a semiannual study being released today, 119 of the 500 fastest machines in the world use Intel microprocessor chips. That is more than double the 56 Intel-based machines counted six months earlier on the so-called Top500 list, which is produced by researchers at supercomputer centers in California, Tennessee and Germany.
Supercomputers, used for tasks ranging from designing nuclear weapons to making movies, originally were made from proprietary circuitry. Most of the fastest machines still use thousands of high-end chips -- typically made by Hewlett-Packard Co. (HWP) or International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) -- and special connections to pass data among the chips at high speed. Machines that use many electronic brains at once are often called massively parallel systems, or clusters.
The latest trend is to use building blocks from personal computers and inexpensive servers, including Intel Pentium or Xeon microprocessors and standard accessory chips. Such"commodity"clusters include a massive system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that is the third-most-powerful in the world, according to the new Top500 list.
Commodity clusters are a major focus of an industry conference beginning tomorrow in San Jose, Calif. They benefit from competition in the PC market that brings rapid performance improvements. Intel, for example, today is boosting the top speed of its Pentium 4 line of chips to 3.2 gigahertz from 3.06 gigahertz.
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