HP Teramac and Moletronics

What does the HP Teramac have to do with the moletronics

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title{{bf What does the HP Teramac have to do with Moletronics?}}

author{{em Nan Zhang }

Department of Computer Science

Michigan State University

East Lansing, MI 48824

{tt [e-mail]}

}

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section{Introduction}

label{SE:intro}

Recently, one of the main microprocessor manufacturer Intel Corp.

announced that a bug within a small number of their Coppermine

microprocessors had been found. And this was not the first time

Intel presented similar announcement. Also, another CPU giant AMD

has been suffered from design and manufacture defect in their

microprocessors for a long time.

The traditional paradigm for computer hardware is to design the

specific circuit including the gates, wires and the way they

connected, and built it perfectly. Perfection of the components is

the baseline of modern computer hardware--a single design or

manufacture defect can cause the entire system crashed. It is

thought that with the chip's increasing of complexity and

shrinking in size, the defect is inevitable, either in design or

manufacture process. An observation that is sometimes called

Moore's second law alleged that the cost of integrated circuits

factories are escalating exponentially with time for attempting to

keep perfection of chips. Then by the year 2012, a single

fabrication plants could cost up to 30 billion dollars.cite

{Teramac98}

As we know, the next generation electronic technology--Moletronics

is a promising way to design faster and more powerful computers.

Computers by moletronics technology is typically constructed by

random chemical and physical procedures, thus the defect in final

product is inevitable. For Moletronics, it is even harder and

economically infeasible to keep all its component perfect. It is

seemed that even though finally we can make out a prototype of

Moletronics computer, the high price will keep most of the users

out of the door.

The resolution to this problem may come from a newly developed

prototype supercomputer in HP, called Teramac. Although the

architecture of the prototype is built on conventional electronic

method. Its principles and approaches will apply a great impact on

Moletronics technique.

section{Basic Concepts}

label{SE:concepts}

The name "Teramac" comes from the word "Tera" which means

"Trillion" or ${10^{12}}$, and "mac" from "Multiple Architecture

Computer". The key point that Teramac differs from conventional

computer architecture is its tolerance to defect. It is evaluated

that there are 200,000 defects in this computer, but surely it

works! And yet it could run in some of its configurations 100

times faster than a single processor workstation.