TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111191/1111300.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.5 KB | 179 lines

                                                                                SCIENCE, Page 74

Machines from the Lunatic Fringe


A trillion calculations a second? In a quantum leap for
supercomputers, a radical new design opens exciting vistas for
science and industry

By PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT


    When Danny Hillis first appeared on the computer scene in
the mid-1980s, it was easy to dismiss him -- and the
odd-looking device he called the Connection Machine -- as part
of the industry's lunatic fringe. The chipmunk-faced scientist
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had achieved a
certain local notoriety from tooling around the streets of
Cambridge in a secondhand fire engine. As an undergraduate he
invented a mechanical computer, made entirely out of Tinkertoys,
that could play tick-tack-toe. And as a graduate student at
MIT's famed Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, he spent much
of his time worrying about things like how infants learn to
recognize their mother's face.

    Moreover, the concept behind the Connection Machine, a big
black cube studded with red blinking lights, had the power and
simplicity of an idea that is too good to be true. Most
computers built over the previous 50 years had been designed to
do one thing at a time; they funneled massive quantities of data
through a single processor (the mathematical engine where the
bulk of a computer's work takes place). Hillis proposed to break
this computational logjam by replacing the single high-speed
processor with large numbers of tiny computer chips that would
attack the data in concert. The experts scoffed when Hillis
argued that such "massively parallel" computers would soon move
into the mainstream of computer science, surpassing in sheer
speed and processing power even the famous supercomputers built
by Cray Research.

    The experts were wrong. Last week when Hillis introduced
the Connection Machine's latest incarnation -- another sleek
black box with red blinking lights -- most of his predictions
had come true. Not only can the Connection Machine 5 lay claim
to being the speediest computer in the world, having bettered
the most powerful Crays on some problems by a factor of 100,
but Hillis' company, Thinking Machines Corp., has become the
leader in one of the industry's fastest-growing markets. The
first seven customers for the CM-5, who paid from $1.5 million
to as much as $25 million for models containing anywhere from
32 to 1,024 processors, include some of the world's premier
computer users: the Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories;
the Army High Performance Computing Research Center at the
University of Minnesota; Syracuse University; the University of
California, Berkeley; and the University of Wisconsin.
Schlumberger, an oil-services company, ordered one to help
interpret seismic data. American Express bought two for
analyzing customer buying habits.

    The success of the Connection Machine marks several
milestones in computer science. One is the widespread acceptance
of the parallel-processing approach to computer design. "This
was a watershed year for massive parallelism," says Gary Smaby,
a supercomputer analyst at the Smaby Group in Minneapolis.
There are more than half a dozen start-up companies selling
parallel-processing computers of one sort or another. Both
Digital Equipment and IBM, the two largest U.S. computer
manufacturers, have endorsed the concept (IBM by forming a joint
venture in September with Thinking Machines), and even Cray
Research has begun work on a massively parallel supercomputer.
Japan has selected the technology as the target for one of its
long-term research undertakings, and at least three Japanese
manufacturers -- NEC, Hitachi and Fujitsu -- are busy making
their own Connection Machine-like computers.

    Hillis' achievement also underscores the growing
importance of supercomput ers -- loosely defined as the most
powerful number crunchers available at any given time. For years
super computers were applied almost exclusively to
national-security tasks, such as breaking codes or designing
ever deadlier nuclear bombs. But the same computers that can
locate a missile in outer space can also be used to find oil
deposits in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and over the past decade a
growing percentage of super computer sales have been to
industry. Today super computers are used for everything from
crash-testing cars to designing fuel-efficient aircraft.

    The most eager consumers of supercomputer time, however,
are scientists. Over the past five years, the number of
researchers with access to supercomputers has grown almost a
hundredfold, to more than 30,000, thanks to a network of
supercomputer centers established by the National Science
Foundation, the national laboratories and various state
governments. In a wide variety of fields from astronomy to
theoretical physics, computer simulation has replaced laboratory
experimentation as a basic tool of scientific research. It is
much easier to study the behavior of ionized gases in a computer
simulation, for example, than it is to build a full-scale
nuclear-fusion reactor. "We've whetted an awful lot of
scientific appetites," says Larry Smarr, director of the
National Center for Super computing Applications at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

    But no sooner had scientists and engineers discovered the
intellectual benefits of supercomputing than they found
themselves bumping into the computational limits of the current
machines. Everything they wanted to do, it seemed, required
1,000 times more computer power than the fastest machines could
provide. Today's models, for example, are not able to determine
the structure of a protein from a sequence of genes. They can
map the earth's atmosphere or its ocean currents but not the
interactions between the two. They can predict hurricanes, but
not such smaller meteorological events as thunderstorms and
tornadoes.

    Last year President Bush's science adviser, D. Allan
Bromley, compiled a list of 10 of these scientific problems,
which he called "grand challenges," and asked Congress for more
than $3 billion over the next five years to develop the
computers and high-speed networks necessary to solve them. (The
$638 million budgeted for 1992 is expected to be approved by
Congress before Thanksgiving.) The centerpiece of Bromley's
program is a research plan to build by 1996 a so-called teraflop
machine, a computer capable of performing 1 trillion scientific
calculations a second.

    That goal may be reached sooner than anyone expected. The
Connection Machine unveiled last week has a modular design that
can be configured with anywhere from 32 to 16,000 processors.
"We could build a teraflop machine today," boasts Hillis. In
fact, a 16,000-processor CM-5 could deliver a peak speed of two
teraflops -- if anyone could afford it. Using today's components
at current prices, such a machine would fill a room the size of
a small gymnasium and cost $200 million. Most analysts believe
that the first teraflop machines will be purchased when their
price drops below $50 million, sometime in the mid-1990s.

    By then customers will have more than Thinking Machines to
choose from. Intel, maker of the chips that run most
IBM-compatible personal computers, is expected to announce its
own teraflop initiative next month at a supercomputer convention
in Albuquerque. Intel introduced a line of aggressively priced
parallel supercomputers a year and a half ago and has nearly
caught up to its Cambridge-based rival. One of its models, an
experimental system called the Touchstone Delta, surpassed the
top speed of the previous version of the Connection Machine last
spring. Meanwhile, new massively parallel machines are expected
over the next couple of years from Minneapolis-based Cray and
such smaller companies as Kendall Square Research in Waltham,
Mass., and Tera Computer in Seattle. By 1995, NEC, Fujitsu and
Hitachi could be marketing their own teraflop machines.

    Who actually sells the first teraflop computer is probably
less important than who buys it. The big payoff from
high-performance supercomputing -- both in profits and in
international competitiveness -- will come when someone uses a
Connection Machine, or a competing model, to design a wonder
drug, a more efficient car or a cleaner-burning fuel. The new
supercomputers are ready for delivery. It remains to be seen who
will make the best use of them when they arrive.