“A computer engineer with an idea of how to make supercomputers faster and more efficient five years ago has translated into a company that today counts the Navy as a major customer and Apple Computer Inc. as a major partner. And the bandwagon for Massively Parallel Technologies, based in 10,000 square feet at the Colorado Technology Center, has picked up speed in recent months as news of its novel approach spreads. The business formed from the ideas of Kevin Howard, who spent 24 years in the computing industry, the last stretch with a local company working on device drivers and operating systems for computers. Dissatisfied with his job, he began searching for arenas where technological progress had leveled off,” Matt Branaugh writes for The Daily Camera.
“The fruits of Howard’s labor sit at the company’s Louisville office: a 153-gigaflop system using 255 computers featuring speeds of 1350 to 1650 megahertz. Overall, the system offers a quarter-terabyte of random access memory and 10.2 terabytes of hard drive space,” Branaugh writes. “A simple problem – such as calculating pi to its 5,000th digit – takes 12 seconds with 31 of the computers used, six seconds with 63 computers and four seconds with 127 computers. For far more complex problems that require hours of computation, the ability to add computers on the fly and accomplish those speeds is ‘really meaningful,’ Howard said. ‘It’s a brand-new way of doing large-scale computing.'”
Full article here.