I'm including the comments of a friend of mine, a parallel programming whiz. On Tue, May 13, 1997 at 18:03:57 (-0700) Louis Proyect writes: > The RS/6000 SP's role in the defeat of Kasparov will be used by IBM as a > marketing wedge against Microsoft. This is downright silly. At conferences, people from IBM have acknowledged that the main benefit of the Deep Blue project is the free, positive PR it generates. Somebody at work said somebody at IBM estimated the equivalent advertising cost of this PR at on the order of $100M. The project isn't terribly expensive to IBM (maybe $10M per year?). The PR is IMHO "brand recognition", kind of like the reason Coke and Pepsi want their names appearing on every surface in sight. IBM doesn't really compete with Microsoft directly, anyway. It has subsidiaries like Lotus that do, in applications software, and it has relatively minor (for IBM) products like OS/2 that compete. But overall, IBM is mostly selling complete systems into specific corporate markets. > In fact the only difference between the SP2 that I work on and > the one that defeated Kasparov is that mine has 8 processors while Deep > Blue has 516 processors working in parallel. This is quite wrong. The Deep Blue SP has far fewer CPUs (32?), but a huge number (about 2,000?) specialized chips attached to these CPUs that are designed to do nothing but search chess game trees and evaluate game positions. > Microsoft's emergence as a successful corporation > is a study in the benefits of privatizing technology created in the public > sphere. Gates developed a proprietary operating system that was modeled in > the final analysis on the publicly available Unix for use on IBM personal > computers. Actually, DOS was modeled on CP/M, a commercial system, while Windows was (as observed) a rip-off of the Mac OS. Where Chairman Bill has benefitted from government support is in the utter lack of enforcement of anti-trust and other "fair play" legislation. As I'm fond of saying, he should be rotting in prison rather than building an extension to his mansion. > What computers like the RS6000/SP can do best is assist human beings make > *intelligent* decisions. The spread of this type of technology in > capitalist society has been mostly to keep track of financial transactions. > In a socialist society, they could be used to monitor resource allocation > worldwide. Banks of RS6000s in a global network could surely be used to > calculate the impact of the substitution of railways for automobiles. Or > the cost of replacing inorganic fertilizers with natural ones, etc. I've often thought this would be a good idea, and would demonstrate how effective a planned economy could be. Besides the obvious problem that tying policy decisions to scientific analyses rather than capitalist bribes is anathema at present, I'm not sure that the state of computer simulation is up to it, because the supercomputer applications that have received funding up to now have been primarily useless things like simulation of nuclear weapons (the current cash-cow for buying big machines). Bill (speaking for his friend) -- William S. Lear | Who is there that sees not that this inextricable labyrinth [EMAIL PROTECTED] | of reasons of state was artfully invented, lest the people quid faciendum? | should understand their own affairs, and, understanding, quaere verum | become inclined to conduct them? ---William Godwin, 1793
