Statistical Mechanics and Special-Purpose Computers

Abstract

A number of special-purpose computers (SPC’s) have been built in the last two decades, and more are under construction. In parallel with the evolution of generalpurpose computers, the capacity of the fastest SPC’s has grown considerably in this period. The increase of speed is partly due to the availability of faster components, but even more important is the introduction of new architectures using pipelining and parallel processing. Apart from becoming faster on the average, a pronounced diversification has taken place in SPC’s which does not only affect their speed but also their versatility and, of course, their cost. An evaluation of SPC performances and costs in comparison with general-purpose supercomputers shows that, under certain circumstances, SPC’s can play a very useful role. They enable calculations that would not be feasible otherwise, because of excessive costs. However, the effort needed to build even a relatively simple SPC can easily be underestimated.