A few months back, Sandia National Laboratories announced they had acquired a new supercomputer. It wasn’t the biggest, but it still offered in their eyes something unique. This particular supercomputer contains NextSilicon’s much-hyped Maverick-2 ‘dataflow accelerator’ chips. Targeting the high-performance computing (HPC) market, these chips are claimed to hold a 10x advantage over the best […]
For as long as there have been supercomputers, people like us have seen the announcements and said, “Boy! I’d love to get some time on that computer.” But now that most of us have computers and phones that greatly outpace a Cray 2, what are we doing with them? Of course, a supercomputer today is […]
Over the decades there have been many denominations coined to classify computer systems, usually when they got used in different fields or technological improvements caused significant shifts. While the very first electronic computers were very limited and often not programmable, they would soon morph into something that we’d recognize today as a computer, starting with […]
The MESM-6 project is focused on bringing the 1960s Soviet BESM-6 computer to the modern age of FPGAs and HDLs. At the moment the team behind this preservation effort consists out of [Evgeniy Khaluev], [Serge Vakulenko] and [Leo Broukhis], who are covering the efforts on the Russian-language project page. The BESM-6 (in Russian: БЭСМ-6, ‘Bolshaya Elektronno-Schetnaya […]