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MAY 25, 1998
RESEARCH
Lights out for original 'fastest super'
Federally funded Touchstone Delta set stage
for later tech
BY ELANA VARON (varon@fcw.com)
The lights will go out on a piece of computing history May
29 when the California Institute of Technology pulls the plug
on the first scalable parallel supercomputer to earn the title
of fastest in the world.
Built by Intel Corp. as a prototype seven years ago, mostly
with federal funds, the 512-processor Touchstone Delta
spawned a new era of scientific computing. The system gave
government and university researchers, for the first time,
enough computing power to pursue such groundbreaking
applications as real-time processing of satellite images and
molecular models for AIDS research.
Although a second version was never built, the Delta was the
foundation for even faster computers - some with thousands
of processors - made by Intel and others and installed today
at NASA, the Defense Department and the Energy
Department as well as other federal labs. Those include
systems made by Intel, IBM Corp. and Silicon Graphics
Inc./Cray Research that are being used to model the
condition of the nation's nuclear stockpile under DOE's
Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI).
...
Intel never planned to build a prototype as large as the
Delta, said Justin Rattner, who designed the system and is
now the director of Intel's Beaverton, Ore., Server
Architecture Laboratory. However, Rattner said, "it had
always been our experience that whenever we proposed to
build a machine of a given size, the potential users wanted a
machine at least twice that big.''
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