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From: jlg@lanl.ARPA (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: Re: Very large memories
Message-ID: <7966@lanl.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 25-Sep-86 15:42:45 EDT
Article-I.D.: lanl.7966
Posted: Thu Sep 25 15:42:45 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 26-Sep-86 01:05:43 EDT
References: <1164@ncr-sd.UUCP> <2383@peora.UUCP> <683@ur-tut.UUCP> <2449@peora.UUCP>
Reply-To: jlg@a.UUCP (Jim Giles)
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 25

In article <2449@peora.UUCP> joel@peora.UUCP writes:
>	I don't agree that applications are growing faster than
>	memory is getting cheaper. I might agree that the applications
>	are growing faster than the amount of memory usually installed
>	in most computers.
>
>	Back in 78 it cost me $200 dollars to add 16KB to my Apple II.
>	Last month I paid $401 to put 2 more megabytes in PC clone.
>	That is a cost decrease of 64 and probably close to 100 if you
>	allow for inflation. Are typical applications 100 times bigger
>	than they were 8 years ago? I don't think so. 10 times maybe.
>...

Scientific applications tend to grow at a rate of about a factor of
100 every ten years.  This is a figure that everyone in the industry
tends to accept as a 'given'.  I know people with specific applications
that could use a factor of 1000 as soon as tomorrow!  Lattice-guage
theory calculations, for example, use 4 dimensional arrays (lattices).
A factor of 1000 is only a factor of 5 in each of the 4 dimensions.
Think how fast problems grow in the super-symmetry problems that
operate in 10 dimensions - just doubling the lattice in each direction
is a factor of 1024 in the memory requirement.

J. Giles
Los Alamos