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Supercomputer expert Cray and Intel have entered a multiyear agreement on high-performance computing, a deal that seems to leave rival Advanced Micro Devices in the lurch.

Under the alliance, Intel will provide chips and silicon expertise to Cray, which in turn will design supercomputers and servers around Intel's chips. Cray, one of the oldest names in supercomputing, has been on a comeback trail in recent years by producing computers based around AMD's Opteron chip.

AMD, however, has had problems following on the success of the first generations of Opteron, a server chip that came out in 2003. A four-core chip, Barcelona, was delayed. AMD also delayed shipments of a follow-on chip, code-named Budapest, to Cray. As a result, Cray had to delay its XT4 supercomputer.

Meanwhile, Intel has reinvigorated its chip designs. While Intel server chips lagged in performance compared with AMD chips four years ago, Intel now claims the performance crown. Intel is also inserting high-speed input/output links in future generations of chips, an architectural feature that helped the early versions of Opteron outdo Intel's server chips.

I had a great time over the weekend at the 10th Vintage Computer Festival, which took place in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

A LINC system in the home of programmer Mary Allen Wilkes in 1965

(Credit: Courtesy Mary Allen Wilkes and DigiBarn)

In addition to the exhibits of vintage computers--including the largest collection of Radio Shack Pocket Computers I've ever seen--and the marketplace, where I managed to avoid buying any slide rules, Vectrix video games, or Cray supercomputer circuit boards--there were several notable presentations.

On Saturday, Tim McNerney spoke about his work to reimplement the Intel 4004 microprocessor, which led to a 130x-scale working model of the chip composed of individual transistors on a large circuit board exactly duplicating the layout of the original integrated circuit. Pretty cool.

On Sunday, two talks were especially interesting to me.

Phil Lapsley presented a history of phone phreaking--using tone generators called "Blue Boxes" to make long-distance phone calls without paying. Several key players in the computer industry were introduced to engineering and computer science through phreaking, including Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Woz's friend John Draper, who wrote EasyWriter, an early word processor for the Apple II.

Draper was on hand for Lapsley's presentation and offered his personal insights on some of the key events Lapsley described. For example, Lapsley talked about the 1971 article in Esquire magazine that brought phreaking to broad public awareness. After the article was published, criminal prosecutions of phone phreaks (usually for wire fraud) soared, then began to taper off again five years later when AT&T introduced new telephone switching systems that were immune to the techniques described in the Esquire article.

Draper was able to explain the origin of the Esquire article: a fellow allegedly selling Blue Boxes to the Mafia got caught phreaking because he was using relatively insecure methods. Several phreaks called him to chastise him, which annoyed him enough to spill the beans to the Esquire reporter.

Also according to Draper, phreaking remained technically possible until relatively recently, particularly in towns with small, independent phone companies--but calls in and out of these places are routed through modern switching systems that would cut off any attempts to exploit this potential vulnerability.

However, some international phone systems may remain vulnerable today. An audience member mentioned a 2004 article in Wired that described a trio of blind brothers, Palestinians living in Israel, who were convicted of telecommunications fraud after a "six-year spree of hacking into phone systems and hijacking telephone time" in the 1990s that allegedly yielded $2 million.

And the first shall be last--the final big presentation at VCF X was a 45th anniversary celebration of LINC (Laboratory INstrument Computer), which some say was the world's first personal computer. No less an industry luminary than Gordon Bell, for example, was on hand to make that claim.

The celebration was organized by Bruce Damer, founder of the DigiBarn Computer Museum, a private computer museum in the Santa Cruz mountains currently open by appointment only (apart from occasional open-house events; see this recent CNET article about the DigiBarn collection), and Severo Ornstein, an engineer of the original LINC and author of Computing in the Middle Ages.

Although LINC systems were generally purchased and used for professional rather than personal reasons, it otherwise qualifies as a personal computer. They came with keyboards and displays that could show text or 256x256-pixel black & white graphics, and could be operated from a single AC power outlet. LINCs could be used for biomedical laboratory scientific research, document processing, simple graphical games, and even, in a limited way, digital photographic imaging (according to an anecdote related at the event).

The photo above shows a LINC in the home of Mary Allen Wilkes, who wrote the LINC's system software. I don't know if this qualifies LINC as the world's first home computer, but it has to be pretty close.

It was a big machine; the cabinet on the right side of the picture was roughly the size of a refrigerator, and the cabinet for the operator console and dual tape drives was also pretty hefty. All that hardware combined to offer a 12-bit computer system with 1,024 or 2,048 words of memory. Not bad for 1962...

A LINC machine-- one of several rescued from destruction and stored for years by Scott Robinson--was recently restored by a group of early LINC users who were honored at the celebration along with LINC designer Wesley A. Clark ("not the general," as he says). That machine was up and running in the VCF exhibit area, looking pretty good for a computer almost as old as me!

(Credit: Guardsoft)

Supercomputers need super, or at least novel, debugging.

To meet that need, Cray has just agreed to license Australian software start-up Guardsoft's "relative" debugging technology for use in its new DARPA-funded supercomputer.

Relative debugging allows programmers to track bugs that creep into software as it is modified, or ported from one system to another, according to Guardsoft. It does this by comparing the execution of a suspect program with a clean version. This differs from traditional debugging in two ways: First, it compares program variables not with the user's expectations but with another program known to be correct; second, the process can be automated.

"Relative debugging is orders of magnitude faster than existing approaches because the programmer doesn't have to understand all the details of the code," said Professor David Abramson of Monash University where the technology was developed. "This is particularly valuable when the person performing the debugging is not the original developer."

The new software is called Guard and can be used on a number of platforms, including Linux, IBM's Eclipse, and Microsoft Visual Studio. Cray will use it to help application developers port existing programs into its new supercomputers.

This is all part of DARPA's $250 million effort to develop a High Productivity Computing System, which it hopes will provide a new generation of systems for national security and industrial users. You can find everything you ever wanted to know about relative debugging here.

Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung has begun suspecting that Advanced Micro Devices' quad-core "Barcelona" processor is late, but the chipmaker said Tuesday that it remains on schedule. However, shipments to supercomputer maker Cray of a close Barcelona relative code-named Budapest have slipped.

There is "no delay" for Barcelona, spokesman Phil Hughes said Tuesday. The chips, and some systems using the chips, will be available in the third quarter, he said.

Barcelona is a strategically important chip for AMD, as it tries to regain market share lost to Intel's newer Core 2-based Xeon server processors, the dual-core 5100 and the quad-core 5300.

However, Budapest shipments to Cray slipped. "Specific to Cray, we did have a change in our schedule, as far as when Cray gets Budapest parts," Hughes said, declining to share further specifics.

Barcelona is designed for systems with two or more processor sockets, but Budapest is for single-socket systems.

Cray in May said it delayed an upgrade to its AMD-based XT4 supercomputer until "late 2007."

John Rollwagen, the former chairman and chief executive of Cray, has joined the board of another supercomputing specialist, SiCortex, the company plans to announce Wednesday. SiCortex is building special-purpose energy-efficient processors for Linux-based compute clusters.

Rollwagen replaces Ethernet pioneer Bob Metcalfe, the company said. Rollwagen was an early colleague of Cray founder Seymour Cray and currently is a principal of Quatris Fund, an affiliate fund of St. Paul Venture Capital.

Supercomputing is on the verge of a new era of interactivity, and an IBM thinker forecasts that the change will have wide repercussions among those accustomed to submitting processing jobs and returning days or even months later for results.

"A petroleum engineer might accelerate the discovery process by quickly trying different kinds of analysis and visualization to pinpoint a potential oil field. Automotive engineers could continuously refine their designs to achieve a balance of aesthetics, safety and economics, much the way we keep formatting and reformatting documents until satisfied with the result," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who has led efforts at IBM to retool for e-commerce, Linux and other significant transformations, in his blog.

The change is significant because it puts supercomputing into a realm of technology that is better adapted to how humans think and tackle problems, he said.

"This goes to the essence of how humans prefer to deal with the world and solve problems. We do something, get a response, and then adjust and build on that response. It feels natural to break a problem into a series of steps and keep adjusting to the feedback, whether it is driving a car, talking to a person or interacting with a computer application," he said.

Technology is of course at the root of the change. "Continuous improvements in microprocessors, storage and other technologies are a major factor in this transition. Equally important are the advanced architectures that permit supercomputers to be built from the inexpensive components of the PC and consumer electronics worlds, so that the considerable computing capacity generally required to support interactive applications can be delivered at affordable prices," Wladawsky-Berger said, unsurprisingly pointing to Blue Gene and other IBM products to illustrate his point.