Kids often race their bicycles, pedaling madly to move ever faster. Then they advance to sedans, but covet sports cars, still wanting to push that envelope of speed.
Computer scientists are no different.
The fastest computers created today are capable of speeds of about a teraflop--a trillion operations per second. Already researchers are looking far ahead, yearning for computers a thousand times faster.
The National Science Foundation, in conjunction with NASA and DARPA, have funded eight research projects to creatively approach a petaflop. These pilot projects will be presented at a workshop this Sunday, Oct. 27, at the Frontiers '96 conference in Annapolis, Maryland.
To put the speeds in terms that people can understand: if the speeds of the world's fastest computers just now being built are like the sailing ships Christopher Columbus used to cross the Atlantic, space shuttle speeds are the goal of this research project. Right now, computer speeds are limited by memory storage and by how fast that memory can be transferred to the working parts of the computer. Even with those issues solved, computers operating at petaflop speeds must be massively parallel--any application must be broken into a million pieces, all calculated at once. To wait to solve problems sequentially slows the computer down.
"The first petaflop computers are going to be difficult to use. One of the goals of this project is to see how friendly can we keep them. You don't want computers only a few experts can use. The architectures must support a reasonable programming model without slowing down," said John Van Rosendale, NSF program manager leading the project.
But why would anyone need a thousand trillion operations per second? Any number of applications are already apparent, from real time nuclear magnetic resonance imaging during surgery, to computer based drug design, astrophysical simulation and modeling of environmental pollution and long term climate changes.
"Until the Internet arrived, we had no real appreciation of its impact. Petaflop computers may be like that: we have only a limited sense of the kind of applications this technology will enable," Van Rosendale said.
The eight Pursuing a Petaflop projects are: