The View from DEC
Sam Fuller
Samuel H. Fuller, Vice President of Research, Digital Equipment Corporation, is responsible for the company's corporate research programs, such as work carried out by Digital's research groups in Maynard and Cambridge, Massachusetts, Palo Alto, California, and Paris, France. He also coordinates joint research with universities and with the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC). Dr. Fuller joined Digital in 1978 as Engineering Manager for the VAX Architecture Group. He has been instrumental in initiating work in local area networks, high-performance workstations, applications of expert systems, and new computer architectures.
Before coming to Digital, Dr. Fuller was Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was involved in the performance evaluation and design of several experimental multiprocessor computer systems. Dr. Fuller is a member of the boards of directors of MCC, MIPS Corporation, and the National Research Initiatives. He also serves as a member of the advisory councils of Cornell University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan and is on the advisory board of the National Science Resource Center (Smithsonian Institution-National Academy of Sciences). Dr. Fuller is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
I would like to cover several topics. One is that Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) has been interested for some time in forms of parallel processing and, in fact, massively parallel processing, usually called here SIMD processing.
There are two things that are going on in parallel processing at DEC that I think worthy of note. First, for a number of years, we have had an internal project involving four or five working machines on which we are putting applications while trying to decide whether to bring them to market. The biggest thing holding us back—as stated by other presenters in this session—is that it is a limited market. When there is a question of how many people can be successful in that market, does it really make sense for one more entrant to jump in? I would be interested in discussing with other researchers and business leaders the size of this market and the extent of the opportunities.
The second thing we are doing in massively parallel processing is the data parallel research initiative that we have formed with Thinking Machines Corporation and MasPar. In this effort, we have focused on the principal problem, which is the development of applications. A goal in January of 1989 with Thinking Machines was to more than double the number of engineers and scientists who were writing applications for massively parallel machines.
An interesting aspect I did not perceive when we went into the program was the large number of universities in this country that are interested in doing some work in parallel processing but do not have the government contracts or the grants to buy some of the larger machines we are talking about at this conference. As the smaller massively parallel machines have come forward, over 18 of the MasPar machines with DEC front ends have gone into various universities.
Some people have spoken to me about having supercomputer centers where people are trained in vector processing and having that concept filter down into the smaller machines. Also, as more schools get small massively parallel machines, those students will begin to learn how to develop applications on parallel machines, and then we will begin to see that trend trickle upward, as well.
A very healthy development over the past 12 months is the availability of low- as well as high-priced massively parallel machines. The goal of the DEC-Thinking Machines-MasPar initiative involving universities is no longer to double the number of engineers and scientists. It is now, really, to more than quadruple the number of engineers and scientists that are working on these types of machines, and I think that is quite possible in the year or two ahead.
Our next goal, now that several of these machines are in place, is to begin having a set of workshops and conferences where we publish the results of those applications that have been developed on these machines at universities around the country.
Another significant initiative at DEC is to look at how far we can push single-chip microprocessors. The goal is a two-nanosecond cycle time on a two-way superscalar machine. Our simulations so far indicate that we can achieve capacities on the order of 300 million instructions per second (MIPS). Looking forward and scaling up to our 1993 and 1994 potential, we expect performance peaks to be in the neighborhood of 1000 MIPS.
I hasten to add that in this research program we are doing some of the work with universities, although the bulk of it is being done internally in our own research labs. The idea is to try and show the feasibility of this—to see whether we can make this the basis of our future work. The methodology is to use the fastest technology and the highest level of integration. Attempting to use the fastest technology means using emitter-coupled logic (ECL). We are continuing to work with U.S. vendors, Motorola and National. We've gone through two other vendors over the course of the past 18 months now, and there's no doubt in our minds that while the U.S. vendors are dropping back in some of their commitments to ECL, the Japanese are not. It would have been a lot easier for us to move forward and work with the Japanese. But we made a decision that we wanted to try and work with the U.S. vendor base to develop a set of CAD tools. We're doing custom design in ECL, and the belief is we can get as high a density with the ECL as we can get today with complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOS). It's a somewhat different ECL process. I think some people might even argue that it's closer to bipolar CMOS than ECL. But, in fact, all of the transistors in the current effort are ECL.
Today, packaging techniques can let you dissipate 150 to 175 watts per package. But the other part of the project, in addition to the CAD tools, is to develop the cooling technology so that we can do that on a single part.
Another reason it is not appropriate to call this a supercomputer is the large impact on workstations, because you can surround this one ECL part with fairly straightforward CMOS dynamic random-access-memory-chip second-level and third-level caches. So I think we can provide a fairly powerful desktop device in the years ahead.
What we are building is something that can get the central processing unit, the floating-point unit, and the translation unit, as well as instruction and data caches, on a single die. By getting the first-level caches on a single die, we hope to go off-chip every tenth to fifteenth cycle, not every cycle, which allows us to run the processor two to ten times faster
than the actual speed on the board. So we just use a phase-lock loop on the chip to run it at a clock rate higher than the rest of the system. It also lets us use a higher performance on the processor but then use lower technology for the boards themselves.
Because this is a research project, not a product development, it seems to me it's useful to discuss whether we meet our goal—whether our U.S. suppliers can supply us the parts in 1992 and 1993. This is clearly an achievable task. It will require some aggressive development of CAD tools, some new packaging technology, and the scaling of the ECL parts. But all of those will be happening, so in terms of looking at one-chip microprocessors, it's clear that this is coming, whether it happens in 1994, 1995, or a year or two later.
The next main topic I wanted to talk about is the question posed for this session by the conference organizers, i.e., where the government might be of help or be of hindrance in the years ahead, and I have three points. One is that I think it would be relatively straightforward for the government to ease up on export controls and allow us to move more effectively into new markets, particularly eastern Europe.
DEC has set up subsidiaries in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. It would like to go elsewhere. But a number of the rules hamper us. Now, the other people have talked about the supercomputing performance rules. Well, because DEC doesn't make supercomputers—we make minicomputers—we've run into other problems. We actually began to develop a fairly good market there. Then, in Afghanistan, we followed the direction of the government and stopped all further communication and stopped our delivery of products to eastern Europe.
As things opened up here this past year, it's turned out that the largest installed base of computers in Hungary is composed of Digital machines. Yes, they are all clones, not built by us, but it's a wonderful opportunity to service and provide new software. Right now we're precluded from doing that because it would violate various patent and other laws, so we're basically going to give that market over to the Japanese, who will go in and upgrade the cloned DEC computers and provide service.
The second point is that the government needs to be more effective in helping collaboration between U.S. industry, universities, and the government laboratories. The best model of that over the past couple decades has been the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Digital, in the early years, certainly with timesharing and networking,
profited and contributed well in those two areas. We didn't do as well with work-stations, I think. Obviously Sun Microsystems, Inc., and Silicon Graphics Inc. got the large benefit of that. We finally work up. We're doing better on workstations.
The point is that DARPA has done well, I think, in fostering the right type of collaboration with universities and industries in the years past. We need to do more of that in the years ahead, I think. So I would, number one, encourage that.
I have a final point on government collaboration that I think I've got to get on the table. People have said that their companies are for open systems and that you've got to have more collaboration. DEC also is absolutely committed to open systems. We need more collaboration. But let me caution you. In helping to set up a number of these collaborations—Open Software Foundation, Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology Consortium, and others—the government needs to play a central role if you want that collaboration to be focused on this country.
Unless you have the government involved in helping to set up that forum and providing some of the funding for the riskiest of the research, you will have an international, rather than a national, forum. High-performance computing is the ideal place, I think, for somebody in the government—whether it's the Department of Energy or DARPA or the civilian version of DARPA—to cause that forum to bring the major U.S. players together so we can develop some of the common software that people have talked about at this conference.