Advances in chip design are prompting companies to take advantage of the potential power. But the necessary new markets and software are lagging
During the last technology boom, Dan Reed, a longtime supercomputer researcher and tech policy expert, stayed put in a professorship at the University of Illinois and managed its National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), even as the fabled lab hatched Netscape and helped set off the explosive growth of the Internet. During the dot-com bust that followed, Reed hunkered down in another faculty job at the University of North Carolina.
Now the computer industry is poised for a second transformation, in which supercomputing technology is trickling down to corporate data centers and desktop PCs, supplying them with unprecedented power. This time, Reed isn't missing out. On Dec. 3, he became the latest high-profile hire in a stable of supercomputer scientists that Microsoft (MSFT) is assembling in Redmond, Wash., to study how technology that has been the province of top-flight universities, government research labs, and a few huge corporations can transform everyday computing. "We have an opportunity to rethink issues at a deep level," says Reed, 50. "I said if the surf was up again, I was going to grab my board."
BYE-BYE JOYSTICKS
The waves look inviting for others, too. Inspired by advances in chip design that will likely keep the performance of today's already powerful computers arcing steadily upward for years, tech companies are devising new scenarios in entertainment, engineering, product design, and medicine to take advantage of the potential power. IBM (IBM), the developer of the world's most powerful supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, also supplies processors for graphics-intensive video game consoles from Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. Sony's PlayStation 3 features an IBM chip called the Cell that's also used in huge supercomputers that can easily fill a basketball court.
Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, the two biggest suppliers of computer chips, have managed to cram four so-called processing cores onto their products. That's the equivalent of strapping four PCs together and jamming them into the space of a large envelope—and not much thicker. But the chipmakers don't expect to stop there. They plan to have dozens of processors on silicon chips within a decade. Marshalling all that power could open doors to new ways of interacting with machines.
Intel has talked to console video game makers about using chips that can perform in excess of 1 trillion calculations per second (BusinessWeek.com, 2/12/07) in future products that use cameras to track body motion to control the action, instead of using buttons or joysticks. "We imagine some future generation of [Nintendo's] Wii won't have hand controllers," says Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer. "You just set up the cameras around the room and wave your hand like you're playing tennis." Intel missed out on supplying chips for the current generation of game systems, and is trying to gain a foothold there.
A DEARTH OF NEW MARKETS
But what may dash the dreams of Intel and other hardware makers is a lack of inexpensive, off-the-shelf software to bring supercomputing to the masses. For now, these sophisticated machines require equally sophisticated and, in many cases, custom-developed programs tended to by highly paid engineers. That's why Microsoft is building a brain trust and handing out funds to schools doing work in the field. The software giant is underwriting grants to universities to study how supercomputer-style programming can be applied to personal machines. The company also is building data centers to serve up its new Live online software that a few years ago would have been more at home in a research lab.
Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard on Nov. 13 delivered a new class of mini-supercomputer, designed for small engineering and biotech companies, that costs around $50,000. Callaway Golf is an early HP customer. And IBM, Google, and Yahoo! have launched initiatives in "cloud computing", harnessing supercomputing power for new Web-delivered software for applications like modeling risk in financial portfolios, generating computer graphics, or understanding conversational typed or spoken queries.
