Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!pasteur!ames!eos!eugene
From: eugene@eos.UUCP (Eugene Miya)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: 20 Gflop NEC machine
Keywords: Vector supercomputer NEC
Message-ID: <3218@eos.UUCP>
Date: 15 Apr 89 20:04:47 GMT
References: <14173@duke.cs.duke.edu>
Reply-To: eugene@eos.UUCP (Eugene Miya)
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Calif.
Lines: 46

>SO WHAT?

Permit me to explain why I said this about small supercomputers.
Many people tend to equate "super-" anything with "BIG."  That's called
the Texas mentality.  [Not to dump on Texans, 3 uncles were officially made
honorary Texans after WWII.]  All these SUPER-conducting, SUPER-colliders,
SUPER-tankers running around, etc.  Nothing wrong with said mentality, okay?
Well the problem in computers tends to be the reverse situation.  We are
making machines smaller (unless your only experience is on micros
where you are largely (pun intended) staying the same size, just increasing in
speed and memory capacity.

A 10 inch cube: well when I was first scanning, at first I thought I
was scanning 10 cubic feet, well, that's about the size of a Cray-2
and that's "over a composite GFLOPS."  We've had that for a few years,
note too that NeXT boxes are a cube foot as well.  Remember the measure
there is YEARS.  People are already working all over the work to make
specialized as well as generalized supermachines (there's that stupid
prefix I hate) which will fit into a cube.  We are not alone.
All DARPA is doing is announcing yet another political project.
Remember my favorite little 1941 scene?  "There has to be a way to make
these things smaller?"

There was announced a project to build a "massive memory machine."
What it was: a VAX with a 1 GB physical address space.  When this machine
was announced, there were 2 GB machines rolling off production lines in
two countries of the world.  Needless to say, this announcement (they didn't
have a machine at the time), was regarded as something of a joke.

At a Salishan high speed computing meeting over a year ago, one of my
officemates open up his session by tempering the audience and told them
to question every speaker with the words: SO WHAT?  You should take
his wise words, too.

So if there is anything I hope I have done in all these dumb little keywstokes
of mine [I can't touch type], I hope you got 1) a sense of perspective (size),
2) got a bit of skepticism (or cynicism), and 3) SO WHAT?

Another gross generalization from

--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@aurora.arc.nasa.gov
  resident cynic at the Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers:
  "Mailers?! HA!", "If my mail does not reach you, please accept my apology."
  				Live free or die.
  The computer industry also makes some great new words, one of my favorites
	is vaporware.  Otherwise, just ignore me.