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Compaq to Build Alpha Supercomputer

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the big-and-fast dept.

kfarmer@tru64.org writes, "The French Atomic Energy Commission has placed an order for a supercomputer to simulate and analyze nuclear explosions. The supercomputer will use about 2,000 Alpha chips running in the 1.25-GHz range, or about 2,500 chips at the 1-GHz level."

4 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. overkill... by eyeball · · Score: 4
    What overkill. I can simulate nuclear blasts in just a few hundred clock cycles:
    main()
    {
    printf("Goodbye, world!\n");
    }

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    2B1ASK1
  2. Re:Why would you want to do this? by MattMann · · Score: 4
    Why would you want to put so much into analyzing nuclear explosions?

    they're trying to find the optimal distances to heat the following foods for a light snack:

    • s'mores
    • toasted marshmallows, straight up
    • mac'n cheese
    • tea, Earl Grey, hot

    the project got kicked off accidently when the French Echelon intercepted and misspelled this decrypt from the American Sec. of Defense: "the best way to heat these foods is unclear". The Spanish intercepted these French intercepts and are still pondering a suspicious code phrase: "noleche".

  3. Oh, Sparc me! by MattMann · · Score: 4

    Mhz only has any validity as a benchmark within an architecture. To compare across architectures, you must use bogomips!

  4. Oh Spare me. by Amphigory · · Score: 5
    Why do otherwise knowledgeable people persists in using clock speed as a way of rating CPU speed?

    Repeat after me: Mhz only has any validity as a benchmark within an architecture. And even that validity is limited. A 400Mhz PII is NOT 33% faster than a 300Mhz PII. It's maybe 10%. To talk about Ghz Alphas as though they are at all similar to Ghz Intels is crazy.

    You want to share CPU benchmarks on something like this, talk about SPECint and SPECfp. Not Mhz.

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