Languages vs. machines (was Re: The need for D-scussion)

[Eddie Wyatt]

Stats on TF3

> 
> 30 MW ? Are you sure?

   It may not have been exactly 30MW but is was some outrages number like that.
This thing was suppose to take 1/2 the power output of Yorktown.
The speaker said that if they where to turn this thing on without having
a gradual power increase that the differential in voltage would
melt all the power lines back to power plant.  The same was true
for turning this thing off.  (I can see real meaning given to the
term crash! :-).  

  Note that the machine consisted of 4096 processors.  That means that
each processor was a 1 gigaflop processor - pretty damn impressive 
if they can build it.

  Another interest stat that was brought up was the up time of the
machine.  With the expected hardware failure rate the processors
they could expect to lose a processor onces every three days.

  Canidates for this beast include NASA.  Does anyone at NASA
want to comment?
-- 

Eddie Wyatt 				e-mail: edw at ius1.cs.cmu.edu