Desktop HAL thrashes Big Blue

A Silicon Valley startup has launched what it claims is the fastest and most versatile supercomputer yet - and it sits on a desktop.

Star Bridge Systems (SBS) says its HAL-4rW1 'hypercomputer', nicknamed Hal, can do12.84 trillion calculations per second (12.84 TeraOPs).

This is 60,000 times more than you can get from a 350 MHz PC and more than three times more than from IBM's Blue Pacific supercomputer.

The Blue Pacific uses 5,856 PowerPC 604 processors and draws 3.8Megawatts of power; a HAL uses 280 FPGA chips (see 'How it works') and draws just 1600 watts, about the same as a two-bar fire. It can be plugged into the mains.

SBS president Alfred DiMora said: 'There is nothing in the world like it.'

SBS is developing it for use with Hal software called Viva, a combination of operating system, GUI, object-orientated programming language and toolset.

Applications being considered include comms, search engines, voiceover IP and video compression. But don't rush for your cheque books unless you're very rich: prices start at $2m.

HOW IT WORKS

The SBS hypercomupter dispenses with conventional processors in favour of what is called Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chips made by a company called Xilinx. These contain up to 1 million logic gates that can perform any of the basic logical operations.

Which they perform is dictated by a register of bits, which can be changed very rapidly. Sussex University researcher Adrian Thompson is pictured above with a simpler FPGA. This was used with genetic algorithms, using the same principle as natural selection, to produce what was in effect a self-programming computer which evolves a solution to a task (see Futures, PCW April 1998). www.xilinx.com.