Текст 5.3. Прочитайте текст и подготовьте сообщение об истории и перспективах развития вычислительной техники в СССР.
Is There an End to the Computer Race?
Computers capable of performing billions of operations a second are required for nationwide management of the economy. It was demonstrated by the prominent Soviet scientist, Academician Victor Glushkoy.
Together with his teacher, Academician Sergei Lebedev, and other scientists, he suggested ways to achieve such computer speeds. Nature also suggested what path to follow — the scientists succeeded "only" in understanding it. At a congress in Stockholm in 1974 they shared their ideas with colleagues from other countries. Since then the work on supercomputers has gained pace in all laboratories and design offices.
They are different from ordinary computers primarily, as specialists put it, in architecture. The ordinary computer does the computations sequentially — operation by operation, while the supercomputer operates like brain: all the computations proceed concurrently. A major problem, roughly speaking, is split up into minor ones, and individual parts of the computer, the processors, do the computations simultaneously. During the activities (if required) and at the end of them the computation results are "drained". This can be roughly compared with a tank from which water previously flowed out by one pipe and then from a multitude of pipes — so the tank empties out much faster.
Qualitatively new integrated circuits were required to develop such a computer. They are now the basic component of the Soviet Elbrus supercomputers. It is a whole family of superhigh-capacity machines computing at a speed up to 125 million operations a second. The computation speed is even ten times as fast with a number of special operations.
In the next few years the team is to complete the work on computers with a capacity of above one billion operations a second. It will take a few more years to produce computers with a speed of over 10 billion operations a second. The road to electronic giants is open: fifth-generation computers performing 100 billion operations a second are likely to become available in the foreseeable future. Is there an end to this relay race?
According to an American researcher, we are close to what can be regarded as a true physical limit.
Other specialists regret the sluggishness of electrons. In their opinion, photons — fight "particles" — will permit the performance to be made a thousand times faster.
This would mean that in the future we can expect the emergence of photon computers and that computations will be done by means of light. At least this is what is being hypothesized at present. The most daring futurologists predict that it will take place even before the year 2000. Well, that's not so far away! The race goes on...
5.14. Расскажите о возможностях применения компьютеров. Укажите новые возможности применения компьютеров с появлением микропроцессоров. Продолжите приведенный перечень.
Computer application development in the U.S.S.R.
1951 Scientists application (MESM) 1953 Math tables (BESM)
1954 First public computing service (STRELA)
1956 Language translation experiments (BESM)
1957 Economic calculation (M-2)
1958 Medical application (STRELA) 1961 Process control (DNEPR) 1964 Bank office (URAL)
1966 Chess program (M-220)
1977 Plant management information system (MINSK-22)
5.15. Расскажите о направлениях совершенствования компьютеров, используя модель:
То improve the computer its (reliability) should be increased as/since the greater the (reliability), the better the computer.
price (lower); size (make less); weight (decrease); accuracy (improve); flexibility (increase); sensitivity to temperature (decrease); reading error (eliminate)
