Supercomputer To Use Optical Router

Izmunuti writes "From a NYTimes article: 'Highlighting a radical departure in the design of the fastest computers, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology plans to announce on Monday that it will use an optical router designed by a Texas company as the heart of a campus-wide supercomputer that will be woven together with optical fibers.'"

Comments

Now we just need..

[Lord Bitman]

A pure optical router using analog signals which are passed through a crystal and output at certain locations based purely on their wavelength(wich coresponds to the exact binary data of the full packet) and the path which the light beam is forced to take! HA! Ha HA! MWUAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!
>:D

What? It could happen...

Re:Did anyone else read the headline as:

[Superfarstucker]

guess what.. its *almost* faster than the speed of light. well, if it wasnt light of course :)

IN SOVIET RUSSIA

[Anonymous Coward]

Optical Router Uses Supercomputer

Optical Switching?

[ender81b]

The optiputer will initially consist of about 500 processors linked via the optical switching system that will permit parts of the computer to share information at the speed of light.

In other breaking news electromagnetic radiation (read: electricty) doesn't travel at the speed of light! Coming Soon to Fox: When Reporters Get Confused

At any rate that article was darn short on details, and the company's website wasn't any better. Anybody have any relevant data on exactly how fast this switching system is? I'm curious about their optical router at the heart of the system as well. It is my understanding that the slowest part of any fiber-based system is the router since the signals must be converted from light to electrical than back to light signals again. One would assume that such a design would be entirely too slow to be used as a bus. Of course, I may be entirely wrong...

NUMA?

[skunky-boy]

Good God, is there anything that Dirk Pitt can't do?

NUMA must be -really- branching out. ;)

I'd like to see a...

[Pig Hogger]

I'd like to see a beowulf...
Oh, nevermind.

Speaking of Supercomputers, IBM is building HAL

[toupsie]

Forbes is reporting: ASCI Purple will run at 100 teraflops, or 100 trillion calculations per second, 8 times faster than its current supercomputer ASCI White and at a speed equivalent to the human brain, IBM said.

HAL will be born a few years late...

Re:Speaking of Supercomputers, IBM is building HAL

[cranos]

"at a speed equivalent to the human brain"

Before or after the six pack?

yikes...

[ryochiji]

From the NYT article:
>"the communications lines will be the fastest part of the computer and the processors will become slower "peripherals."

Just imagine....

Us:Back in my days, the processor used to be called the central processing unit, and everything else was a peripheral!
Kids:Sheesh dad, you're old! Everyone knows that the processor's the slowest part.

Optical Router, Supercomputers...

[HappyCycling]

...And it still gets Slashdotted...

Re:Not to be confused with...

[Ratso Baggins]

Which, in turn, is not to be confused with:

the Comittee for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society.

You've missed the point

[The Original Yama]

The point is that a Californian organisation is using something "designed by a Texas company". Now that is "a radical departure"!

Maybe I'm reading this wrong? :)

Forced to go optical

[Sponge Bath]

Because the previous attempt to implement a campus wide supercomputer using an RFC 1149 based network caused the pigeons to burst into flames.

has to be said....

[bsDaemon]

i am the cl-itit commander. no one rules the cl-itit like me. not this little fucker, not any of you little fuckers...

Re:How times change...

[sirsex]

Then you hit Planck's constant.