Do-it-yourself supercomputers Analysis/Commentary Last July, Wired magazine announced that Michael Warden at the Los Alamos National Laboratories built a "do-it-yourself" supercomputer, valued at a measly $150,000, using off-the-shelf components. Now, with similar architectural shortcuts, Kent Gilson, chief programmer at Star Bridge Systems in Sandy, Utah, says he has created a "hypercomputer" that works faster than Blue Pacific (IBM's current "fastest computer in the world"). Gilson's computer, HAL400, has a beguilingly simple engine. For over a decade, engineers have employed Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to power simple electronic devices. The specialty microchips reconfigure their instructions thousands of times per second. Unlike their cousins, silicon wafers by Intel or Motorola whose instructions are carved into them, FPGAs vary their overall instruction sets to conform to the operations they are performing. By loading 36 circuit boards with 280 of the reconfigurable chips, Gilson claims he can replicate the parallel power of machines by IBM and Silicon Graphics. Gilson's computer fits onto a desk top and weighs less than 150 lbs. It plugs into the average wall outlet and requires no more power than a high-end blow dryer. Compare this to the mammoth installations surrounding conventional supercomputers. Consider also the cost of conventional number crunchers: IBM's Pacific Blue costs about $100 million. HAL sells for approximately $26 million. Gilson says that HAL reaches processing speeds of nearly 13 trillion operations per second while Blue Pacific maxes out at 3.6 trillion. That also makes HAL 60,000 times faster than an average Pentium II running at 350 megahertz. Nevertheless, HAL hasn't been professionally benchmarked. The most daunting challenge to using reconfigurable chips in general systems in the past has been inventing software that can talk to them. FPGAs are generally thought too unstable for use in computer systems. Gilson claims to be perfecting a new software language, tool kit, and operating system called "Viva" that does just that. On the business side of the company, Al Dimora, Gilson's partner at Star Bridge, feels that reconfiguable computing technology will bring supercomputer power to the average desktop and speed up broadband data across FPGA-driven routers and switches. The partners want to begin by selling supercomputers, then move on to personal computers, Internet telephony, and film lab special effects. Critics scoff at the ambitious plans. Some engineers say reconfigurable computing lies 5 to 10 years away, according to Forbes' ASAP magazine. Others simply say that the whole idea is crazy. The comments recall the ill-fated prediction of Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, in 1943: "I think there's a world market for maybe 5 computers" June 30, 1999