🚀 go-pugleaf

> In article <753@polaris.UUCP>, josh@polaris.UUCP (Josh Knight) writes:
> > Indeed, the proposal to use long integers is wasteful
> > of the very resource that is usually in short supply in these calculations,
> > namely memory (reference to all the "no virtual memory MY Cray!" verbage).
> > When Ed stores the mass of a 10 solar mass star in his simulation of the
> > evolution of an open cluster as a 512 bit integer, approximately 500 of
> > the bits are wasted on meaningless precision.  
> 
> I guess I didn't really make myself clear in my original posting.  I
> didn't mean to imply that ONLY 512 bit integers would be available, but
> COULD be available, just as bytes and double-bytes are availble as
> subsets of the 32-bit integers on a Vax (ooops -- sorry, Josh).
> It would not be an unreasonable implementation to have registers of,
> say, 128 bits, so "quad integers" of 512 bits would have to be
> operated on in 4 pieces.  My point was to substitute integer operations
> for floating ones and still retain workable precision.
> -- 
> Ed Nather
> Astronomy Dept, U of Texas @ Austin
> {allegra,ihnp4}!{noao,ut-sally}!utastro!nather
> nather@astro.AS.UTEXAS.EDU

Such a machine is in fact being built. The machine physically resides at
U. Oregon and was designed and built by Duncan Buell, Don Chiarulli and 
Walter Rudd. It is a 256 bit machine which can be changed dynamically at
run time to act as 8 32 bit processors in parallel, as 4 64 bit processors
etc.

It is intended for research in computational number theory, especially
integer factorization.

Bob Silverman