RE: COMPUTING: IBM Systems Journal discusses Blue Gene

From: Dr. D. B. Karron (karron@casi.net)
Date: Wed Aug 29 2001 - 17:36:57 MDT


TERA now Cray ?
Seymour Cray was CDC.
There were a number of struggling supercomputer companies in the 80's.
Cray is now Silicon Graphics.
Silicon Graphics became SGI.
SGI may become Linux Is Us or nothing.

Something did not ring true in what you wrote.

D. B. Karron (Ph.D.), Chief Technical Officer
Computer Aided Surgery, Inc. (CASI)
300 East 33rd Street, Suite 4N. New York NY 10016
TELEPHONE: +1 (212) 686 8748, FAX: +1 (212) 448 0261
E-MAIL: karron@casi.net or casi@thorn.net
URL: http://www.casi.net

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-extropians@extropy.org
[mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.org]On Behalf Of Robert J. Bradbury
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2001 3:54 PM
To: Extropy List
Subject: COMPUTING: IBM Systems Journal discusses Blue Gene

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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