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From: WBD.TYM@OFFICE-2.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.physics
Subject: Quickly Computing Quarks (Science News, VOL. 128)
Message-ID: <509@sri-arpa.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 19-Aug-85 13:20:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.509
Posted: Mon Aug 19 13:20:00 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 23-Aug-85 07:47:34 EDT
Lines: 24

From:  William Daul / McDonnell-Douglas / APD-ASD  

...news of at least one IBM research effort in high-speed computing surfaced at
last month's National Computer Conference in Chicago.  A team of physicists 
will soon take over a specially built computer designed to solve a single 
physics problem.   According to an IBM official, this computer is supposed to 
take less than a year to solve a provblem that would take a CRAY-1 
supercomputer more than 300 years to do.

The IBM machine, developed at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown 
Heights, N.Y., consists of an array of 576 processors, each one capable of 20 
million "floating point" operations per second (equivalent to multiplying two 
decimal numbers 20 million times).  In contrast, a typical personal computer 
performs 1,000 or so such operations per second.  When all the processors are 
working in parallel, each one handling a small part of a computation, the IBM 
computer can handle more than 10 billion floating point operations per second.

The machine will be used to calculate the mass of a proton from "first 
princilple," applying quantum chromodynamics theory.  This year-long exercise 
should give physicists some clues as to the valididty of their concepts about 
quarks and gluons.  Once this project is over, the machine could be used for 
uther purposes, says IBM's George Paul.  And the computer's design team is 
already thinging about how to extend the ideas they developed for the original 
machine.