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From: rdippold@cancun.qualcomm.com (Ron Dippold)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: 5 billion computations per second!!!
Message-ID: <1991Mar26.175639.28180@qualcomm.com>
Date: 26 Mar 91 17:56:39 GMT
References: <2480@umriscc.isc.umr.edu>
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In article <2480@umriscc.isc.umr.edu> mcastle@mcs213e.cs.umr.edu (Mike Castle {Nexus}) writes:
>Was listening to National Public Radio earlier, and they had a little piece
>on computers.  They mentioned some sort of tests run at Los Alamos something
>or the other.  They said the fastest machine ran there was one made by 
>Thinking Machines, Corporation, and turned in a result of 5 BILLION computations
>per second. 
>
>Now, since the news show is not all that technically knowledgable, I assumed he
>meant 5000 MIPS , as opposed to 5000 different computations.
>
>Does anyone have any more information on this??  What test were run?  What 
>machine is it??  How much is it?  When can I get one? ;->
>
>Rather dumbfounded by these results,

They are likely talking about the Connection Machine, a massively parallel
computer that uses up to 65536 processors running simultaneously.  That number
doesn't sound unreasonable.  And they probably did mean MIPS...

To give you an idea, the Cray III is specced to run at 16 Gigaflops, last I
heard of it.