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At age 12 Kent built a commercial-quality, space-invaders-type computer game.

Check it out, you'll see what I mean.

I emailed them about this at the time, but didn't receive a reply 8o)

HAL 300
HAL 15

HAL 300
HAL 15

They go on to describe a hierarchical GUI that connects functional block to make bigger functional blocks. Somebody with years of experience in traditional programming probably won't find their skills translate too easily.

Go read http://www.starbridgesystems.com if you find this hard to believe. It's nothing really new and it's for real. But a 1000 times faster than a pentium 4 can most probably only be achieved on certain tasks. Probably tasks which can easily be done using dedicated hardware which can now be made instantaneous (difficult word) using these FPGA's.

The VIVA project was initiated several years ago to bring high-level computer language capability to FPGA programming and to take advantage of the massively parallel capabilities of FPGAs. FPGAs are cheap to make, much cheaper than complex microprocessors such as the Intel Pentium III. The yield rate is higher because the deposition densities are much more uniform for FPGAs than for microprocessors. Furthermore, the entire chip surface can be dedicated to usable transistors, with the potential to provide orders of magnitude more computing capability on the same size chip.

The homepage of the company building these thing is starbridgesystems.com

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"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"

I think the only real reason that NASA is going to be `one of the first', is simply the fact that nobody seems to buy these things. Which is a pity. What's really REALLY sad, is that their claim to have a $1000 version available by now (link to /. article) is still vaporware.

The whole field of Configurable Computing has been trying out architectures like this for some time (don't know why /. hasn't covered this technology more).

I'll tell you why /. hasn't covered the technology more: because FPGAs on their own are mainly just an amorphous sea of gates. You need a lot more than that before you have a viable (and therefore interesting) computing engine. StarBridge came up with such a working system and so it was no surprise to see it featured on Slashdot.

In contrast, Xilinx's strides in FPGA and RC technology tend not to feature because there's a gulf between a beautiful RC chip like the 6200 and actually being able to compute with it. Even Xilinx know that now -- their newer devices are more advanced FPGAs but they don't even attempt to carry the generic RC mantle like the 6200 tried to do, unsuccessfully. It came close, but you need a lot more than just an FPGA to make a useful RC: you needs a preconfigured computing architecture to start with, otherwise the programmer needs to think in terms of gates, and that's one paradigm shift too far. The 6200 suffered from not being specific enough. That's a peculiar observation to make in the FPGA field, but it reflects reality in the computing field, and even RCs need to take that into account.

And that's what PACT seem to have done with their XPP. Sure, its reconfigurable parts are based on FPGA technology (the only sensible way of doing it), but they've created a whole new dataflow computing engine with that RC resource, and it's the latter that's interesting for computing people, not the FPGA itself nor the internal RC mechanism.

My favorite site of this nature remains Star Bridge Systems, who should be shipping their pentaflop computer any day now ...

Memory was just one example.
When they can lay these out on a chip to make VLSI circuits, they could build massively parallel reconfigurable devices. Imagine if the folks at Starbridge Systems, who are already building reconfigurable ASICs, made their next Pensa Processor with this stuff. Obviously I think the Pensa stuff is interesting already with just regular silicon.

Hot Tamales
The main problem regarding mechanical nanocomputers as I understand it is that the heat generation problem isnt just going to go away. Even if moving bonds dont have friction, moving parts will still generate thermal radiation. Frequencies of operation will have to be selected with consideration of the normal modes of the components in motion. Add to that the regular heating that results from resistive current flow and you get a major heating problem. The reconfigurable circuit system would help it recover from real-time circuit failures, but I still wonder how long such a package would last. They might end up having an in-use half-life of a few days, such that you have to keep replacing them or use them only at 1% capacity to stretch out their effective useful lives (and keep the data intact long enough to port!).

JF

Memory was just one example.
When they can lay these out on a chip to make VLSI circuits, they could build massively parallel reconfigurable devices. Imagine if the folks at Starbridge Systems, who are already building reconfigurable ASICs, made their next Pensa Processor with this stuff. Obviously I think the Pensa stuff is interesting already with just regular silicon.

Hot Tamales
The main problem regarding mechanical nanocomputers as I understand it is that the heat generation problem isnt just going to go away. Even if moving bonds dont have friction, moving parts will still generate thermal radiation. Frequencies of operation will have to be selected with consideration of the normal modes of the components in motion. Add to that the regular heating that results from resistive current flow and you get a major heating problem. The reconfigurable circuit system would help it recover from real-time circuit failures, but I still wonder how long such a package would last. They might end up having an in-use half-life of a few days, such that you have to keep replacing them or use them only at 1% capacity to stretch out their effective useful lives (and keep the data intact long enough to port!).

JF

Memory was just one example.
When they can lay these out on a chip to make VLSI circuits, they could build massively parallel reconfigurable devices. Imagine if the folks at Starbridge Systems, who are already building reconfigurable ASICs, made their next Pensa Processor with this stuff. Obviously I think the Pensa stuff is interesting already with just regular silicon.

Hot Tamales
The main problem regarding mechanical nanocomputers as I understand it is that the heat generation problem isnt just going to go away. Even if moving bonds dont have friction, moving parts will still generate thermal radiation. Frequencies of operation will have to be selected with consideration of the normal modes of the components in motion. Add to that the regular heating that results from resistive current flow and you get a major heating problem. The reconfigurable circuit system would help it recover from real-time circuit failures, but I still wonder how long such a package would last. They might end up having an in-use half-life of a few days, such that you have to keep replacing them or use them only at 1% capacity to stretch out their effective useful lives (and keep the data intact long enough to port!).

JF

Has anyone checked out these guys?

www.starbridgesystems.com

I still ask myself if this if a legitimate company or a hoax...

The url is www.starbridgesystems.com and they appear to be alive, well, and selling systems.

Though I wouldn't call this the same concept as transmeta. FPGAs are fully programmable, and have no reall core; it all lies outside of the FPGA.

Patents claims aside, these hardware ideas are not new. What's going to make or break any of these ventures is at the software level-- how they efficiently transmute one set of instructions into hardware (either microcode or gate-array logic). From our experience with all the different flavors of Java virtual machines and their relative performance and compatability, we should recognize how difficult it will be to come up with a "MetaOS" that drives configurable hardware.

The speed of tailored gate array logic at specific tasks is phenomenal. The reconfigurability of "field-programable" gate arrays, like those produced by Xilinx have already proved useful in creating lightening fast photoshop plugin filters.

We should cheer if Transmeta or Starbridge come up with novel hardware and software that increases the generality and usefulness of these ideas. Be skeptical of the hype, but not the vision.

Previous Slashdot reference to starbridge is here.

I didn't understand very much of the patent, but it sounds a bit like a description of a Field Programmable Array (FPGA) Processor. That would be conform the rumors I read in the replies to a post about the FPGA-processors which Starbridge Systems has already build. Their description is really cool; the slashdot-post talks about their "$1000 computers 350 times as fast as a pII-350". That may be a bit much, but the concept is extremely nice.

I'm pretty sure this is the company you remember.

http://www.starbridgesystems.com/home/mainpage.h tm

Also try looking here, I think they were mentioned on /. a while back. They claim to have a "Hypercomputer" that is rated at an overall sustained performance of 100 TFLOPS (100 trillion 32-bit floating point operations per second). Also they say that it takes up 4 cubic feet of space, weighs 150 lbs., and plugs into a 110-volt wall outlet. Pretty cool.

Starbridge Systems

http://www.starbridgesystems.com/home/mainpage.h tm

Right now I hold Starbridge Systems in as much esteem as I hold American Computer. Starbridge systems makes provably bogus performance claims. They're not overstated nor are they misleading, they're bogus. Maybe they do have something but their marketing department is overzealous and/or stupid, either way having such obviously false information sure makes it look like a scam.

I believe Starbridge Systems has already sold a supercomputer with a FPGA processor and is developing what they call "a new personal supercomputer that will change the PC industry forever". This has already been posted on /. before. Still very interesting though. They also say "SBS's Hypercomputer systems can emulate virtually any hardware, including other supercomputers", so running Linux or *BSD on it shouldn't be much of a problem :)

I think the company you're referring to is Starbridge Systems. Interesting company, that. A rip off their web page:

SBS's Hypercomputer systems may be described as massively-parallel, reconfigurable, third-order programmable, ultra-tightly-coupled, fully linearly-scaleable, evolvable, asymmetrical multi-processors which achieve unprecedented benefits in performance, design time, speed, flexibility, power consumption, reliability, size, and cost.

SBS's Hypercomputer systems already reconfigure themselves on-the-fly (up to 1,000 times per second, i.e. in real time) and they are not bound, as this author suggests, to run a single computationally intensive algorithm. They simultaneously perform multiple tasks previously requiring separate, dedicated (meaning hardwired or fixed) hardware configurations (and usually separate software programs as well) for each separate task. If an electronic system is required to do ten different things, with reconfigurable logic only one programmable chip (an FPGA) is needed, rather than ten hardwired chips (application specific integrated circuits, or ASICs).

Whatever the hell that means. Basically the jist of what they're saying (as I'm interpreting it) is that their computers are able to be reconfigured in hardware so they're like an infinite number of devices designed specifically to take on an entire task. They'd be more efficient just like Deep Crack was exceptionally fast at its single-purpose job of cracking DES, or a 3D graphics card is fast at rendering graphics - far faster than your average, all-purpose CPU. Could be interesting. (Computer, switch to RC5 mode!)

Anyone have any other information on this?

Jonathan Wang

It's pretty obvious that these guys are a fraud. If they had a real product, they would have every major hardware in the world lined up to buy them out for a billion dollars. Then they would have the resources to building more than the hundred machines a year they claim to be limited to.

Also, if they had a real product they would have some kind of proof. Like cracking RC5 keys. That would be a great proof! Build a supercomputer, design a distributed.net client for it, and then start beaking records with your demo machines.

So the real question is what these weasels are up to. I'm sure that they know that no one is dumb enough to hand over $26 million for a box full of vaccum tubes. They would have found out a long time ago that no one can award a $26 million contract without an ironclad proof of technology. Besides, their web page doesn't even make sense. They say that they have a proprietary operating system, but then on their hardware page it says that it will run either UNIX (I guess any flavor!) or Windows NT.

I suspect that they may be trying to find suckers willing to get certified in their development language, "Viva". They list a training course as being available. To participate, all you have to do is sign this an NDA and send it right in. Of course, all training will happen over the web. So you won't be able to tell what kind of machine that you are taking your training on. Or complain to someone if you figure out the scam. So even if there is no suckers willing to hand over $26mm, they're probably hoping to find a thousand frustrated postal workers willing to spend $5,000 to be the first to be trained in this technology that will enable them to "ride a great tide of change as one paradigm of computing technology gives way to another". And once they are trained, they get to work for Star Bridge Systems! And they get paid in "valuable computing cycles". I'm not making this up folks!

It's pretty obvious that these guys are a fraud. If they had a real product, they would have every major hardware in the world lined up to buy them out for a billion dollars. Then they would have the resources to building more than the hundred machines a year they claim to be limited to.

Also, if they had a real product they would have some kind of proof. Like cracking RC5 keys. That would be a great proof! Build a supercomputer, design a distributed.net client for it, and then start beaking records with your demo machines.

So the real question is what these weasels are up to. I'm sure that they know that no one is dumb enough to hand over $26 million for a box full of vaccum tubes. They would have found out a long time ago that no one can award a $26 million contract without an ironclad proof of technology. Besides, their web page doesn't even make sense. They say that they have a proprietary operating system, but then on their hardware page it says that it will run either UNIX (I guess any flavor!) or Windows NT.

I suspect that they may be trying to find suckers willing to get certified in their development language, "Viva". They list a training course as being available. To participate, all you have to do is sign this an NDA and send it right in. Of course, all training will happen over the web. So you won't be able to tell what kind of machine that you are taking your training on. Or complain to someone if you figure out the scam. So even if there is no suckers willing to hand over $26mm, they're probably hoping to find a thousand frustrated postal workers willing to spend $5,000 to be the first to be trained in this technology that will enable them to "ride a great tide of change as one paradigm of computing technology gives way to another". And once they are trained, they get to work for Star Bridge Systems! And they get paid in "valuable computing cycles". I'm not making this up folks!

And sure, sell the first system for $26 million, and the following systems for $1000 each? Supposedly they sold one system so far - I wonder who bought it. Either the company itself, or one of their VCs, probably. That's a neat way to raise money...

How about StarBridge Systems HAL computer? It was in Slashdot a while ago (where are the archives?). Remember, it outperforms the largest supercomputer, yet sits on a desktop. Also, you could fire a bullet through it and it would keep running. It uses FPGA circuits.

The guy behind this is named Kent Gilson. We haven't heard much from him lately.

(I think you could even run Linux on it.)

Here is a quarterly survey of the top 500 most powerful systems in the world. FYI: Currently, the ASCI Red is at the top. Maybe we'll see Star Bridge Systems (SBS) up at number 1 soon.

The Cray T3E #1024

per their about us page

Well, that tells me a little more... but not much. There are 3 different models of that particular machine, depending on whether it uses 300, 450, or 600MHz Alphas. Based on the 1 TFLOP number they quote, I'm guessing they mean the model with the 600MHz chips (the T3E-1200E/1088).

I liked the following little piece of idiocy from SBS's "About us" page:

The Cray machine, which costs approximately $76 million, can perform at a peak speed of one trillion instructions per second in a narrow class of applications. It cannot sustain performance at peak speed.

Well, duh!!! Of course it can't sustain peak! There's no machine in the world that can sustain more than about 50% of peak performance on useful, real world code; usually that number's closer to 25-30% of peak. Unless SBS knows something serious about compiler technology that the rest of us haven't figured out yet, sustaining a system's peak performance is impossible.

Their 12 teraop number is very suspicious, too. They define an "op" as a 4-bit integer add. The ops they quote on the T3E are 64-bit floating-point adds and multiplies. Apples and apples? I don't think so. There aren't too many interesting problems you can do with 4-bit integers, either; maybe extremely lossy signal processing, but that's about it.

I also noticed that SBS's press release page has been taken down some time in the last day or so... I'd love to believe these guys have some kind of breakthrough, but from everything I've seen they're either extremely naive or lying out their collective butts.

--Troy

The Cray T3E #1024

per their about us page

Well, that tells me a little more... but not much. There are 3 different models of that particular machine, depending on whether it uses 300, 450, or 600MHz Alphas. Based on the 1 TFLOP number they quote, I'm guessing they mean the model with the 600MHz chips (the T3E-1200E/1088).

I liked the following little piece of idiocy from SBS's "About us" page:

The Cray machine, which costs approximately $76 million, can perform at a peak speed of one trillion instructions per second in a narrow class of applications. It cannot sustain performance at peak speed.

Well, duh!!! Of course it can't sustain peak! There's no machine in the world that can sustain more than about 50% of peak performance on useful, real world code; usually that number's closer to 25-30% of peak. Unless SBS knows something serious about compiler technology that the rest of us haven't figured out yet, sustaining a system's peak performance is impossible.

Their 12 teraop number is very suspicious, too. They define an "op" as a 4-bit integer add. The ops they quote on the T3E are 64-bit floating-point adds and multiplies. Apples and apples? I don't think so. There aren't too many interesting problems you can do with 4-bit integers, either; maybe extremely lossy signal processing, but that's about it.

I also noticed that SBS's press release page has been taken down some time in the last day or so... I'd love to believe these guys have some kind of breakthrough, but from everything I've seen they're either extremely naive or lying out their collective butts.

--Troy