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But this tidy pie chart may soon be upset by the surprise entry of a new player that for the past two decades has been most conspicuous by its absence from the supercomputer market: IBM. In December the largest computer manufacturer (1987 sales: $54.2 billion) announced that it had struck a deal with Steve Chen, one of the foremost supercomputer designers, who jolted the computer world last September by suddenly leaving his post as a vice president at Cray. With financial aid from IBM, Chen has set up his own company to develop a machine 100 times as fast as any currently on the market. "People say that IBM is just dipping its toes into the water," notes Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an IBM vice president. "We're in the middle of the ocean."
IBM has not only taken the plunge but has also put its prestige and enormous resources behind a radical kind of supercomputer that represents a dramatic break from the past. Since World War II, most computers have been designed to do things one step at a time, moving data in and out of a single high-speed processor. The computer Chen is building with IBM's backing will contain not one but 64 processors, all operating at the same time, in parallel, and thus significantly cutting down computing time. IBM's decision to support a major parallel-processing supercomputer project is a sign that technology is headed in that direction. Says H.T. Kung, computer scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University: "In one move, IBM legitimized two technologies: supercomputing and parallel processing." AT&T Bell Laboratories is expected to introduce a new parallel-processing computer at the American Physical Society meeting in New Orleans this week.
Cray, IBM and AT&T could be upstaged, however, by a determined gang of innovative computer designers who have already moved beyond 64 processing units to build machines that divide their work among hundreds, even thousands of processors. Last week scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque announced that they have coaxed a 1,024-processor computer into solving several problems more than 1,000 times as fast as a single-processor machine acting alone, an unprecedented speedup that suggests the performance of supercomputers may in the future be related almost directly to the number of processors they employ.
Much supercomputing research is funded by the U.S. Government, whose appetite for high-speed, number-crunching power for both defense and intelligence uses seems boundless. Last year the Pentagon spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to step up the speed of the fastest machines. One Government project that has a special need for supercomputing power is the national aerospace plane, a high-altitude aircraft intended to carry military and civilian cargo at up to 25 times the speed of sound. Since there are no wind tunnels capable of simulating such blistering airspeeds, the hypersonic plane will have to be tested on supercomputers, ideally on machines many times as powerful as existing models. Presidential Science Adviser William Graham has recommended that Congress appropriate an additional $1.7 billion to support the development of parallel-processing supercomputers that by the mid- 1990s could crunch data at teraFLOPS speed.