As many of you know special purpose computing architectures
have had a rough go of it in the PC era. nCUBE, Thinking
Machines and TERA (now Cray) haven't had "stunning" success.
Even Cray is getting into the "Linux Cluster" business.
But when IBM decides to build a special purpose computer for
biological applications -- *then* you have to pay attention.
IBM has devoted the current issue of its Systems Journal
to unveiling some of the applications it anticipates for
"Blue Gene". In particular an article by Allen et al
details some of the features of the architecture itself.
In a paper that I hope to release sometime in September
one of the things I mention briefly is a possible speedup
in the path to MNT enabled by hardware like Blue Gene.
It may be useful for the technophiles amongst the list
to familiarize themselves with the IBM specs so when
they read my paper they can consider whether I'm being
excessively conservative.
Robert
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