Re: Harnessing Unused Computer Power Over A Network

[Tom Droege <droege@wwa.com>]

They have been building computer farms in High Energy Physics for about 20
years.  I designed and built a bunch of vector processors for the
experiment that found the top quark.  Hmmm!  I can't even remember the
number - about 80 I think.  Fast (at the time) ECL machines.  At the same
time a guy from SLAC, Paul Kuntz, was building IBM emulator machines from
TTL chips.   Eventually they won out over my vector processors.  You can
find the M7 in the literature.  "The Magnificent Multi Muon Mass and
Momentum Monitoring Machine."   The M7 was a 5 address machine.  Harvard
architecture.  It did c=a*x+b*y as a single instruction.  All hard wired
with two ECL 12 bit multipliers.  At least I can say that I once designed a
whole computer that was built in quantity.  I think that puts me in a
pretty exclusive club.
  
As far as I know Kuntz should get credit for really building effective
parallel machines.  There was also project at U of IL, but they did not
really learn how to program it.  They were trying to do real parallel
processing.  In high energy physics we just have a lot of computing to do,
and you can just parcel it out to many slow computers, one event per
computer.  We have a lot of events.  I think that Fermilab is on about
their fifth or sixth generation of distributed processors.  The top quark
data was reduced on such a farm.

Tom Droege

At 01:31 PM 5/6/98 -0700, you wrote:
>Pittinger, Martin J. wrote:
>
>> >
>> > Brief Description:
>
>> > Forum and presents the use of distributed processing
>> > for debris analysis. The brief is concentrated on
>> > how currently unused networked personal computers
>> > could be put to work through the use of distributed
>> processing over the network. 
>> 
>> Maybe TASS could use this method in the near future
>
>Another place where this technique is used
>is Fermi Lab, Tom may have heard something.  I hear they
>are installing a "Linux Farm". A few hundred boxes all
>networked together. Also the movies "Titanic" and "Toy
>Story" are mostly computed on "farms".
>
>Another  use of this technology is the "DES Chalange"
>RSA is sponcering an effort the rouinely crack the government
>approaved DES encryption standard.  They are using a brute force
>attack on the 56 bit key by employing thousands of computers
>across the Internet.
>
>I gave the examples above top reenforce Martin's message and 
>show that this is not science fiction of vapor.  It is a real
>techniuqe used in industry to solve very hard computational
>problems on a shoestring budget.  It is something TASS could
>do if we ever are faced with a very hard computational
>problem.
>
>-- 
>--Chris Albertson
>
>  chris@topdog.logicon.com                Voice:  626-351-0089  X127
>  Logicon RDA, Pasadena California          Fax:  626-351-0699
>
>
>