MacCray?
via MacCNN
>A reader passed along an interesting snippet about the distributed computational power of the NeXT operating system (hopefully, to be incorporated into Rhapsody):
"...Richard Crandall, NeXT's chief scientist, has written a free program called
Zilla, dubbed the "community supercomputer", for which he was awarded the
1991 Computerworld Smithsonian Award in the Science Category. Zilla can
bring supercomputer benefits to non-expert users in any field of application
where a large task can be broken down into a number of smaller tasks. Zilla is
designed to automatically move a task around a NeXT network to wherever
there is free computer time, backing away from any given machine when it
detects that someone is using it. A recent study of workstations found that,
on average, only 2 to 3 percent of their power is actually used; Zilla therefore
represents a practical way to harness the 97 percent of these resources
which is currently being wasted. In fact, a network of 100 NeXT computers can
reach Cray-like supercomputer speeds on some problems, but costs less than
10 percent as much to purchase, and requires far less electricity and
maintenance to operate. NeXT has used Zilla to perform successful numerical
analyses in the 100-1000 megaflop region, already making four numerical
discoveries that are important in the world of advanced mathematics."<
macnn.com |
