[Cryptography] massively parallel processing

[John Denker]

On 09/14/2016 10:00 AM, Henry Baker wrote:

> The multiprocessor revolution is just beginning to take off; I can
> recall my first computer (IBM 1401) with 4,000 (not 4096!)
> "characters" of RAM; we're nearly to the point where a consumer can
> purchase a computer with 4,000 *processors*.

You can get GPU cards with more than 2000 cores per card.  For
bitcoin mining, or for physics simulations -- or for "consumer"
applications such as fancy graphics -- you might plug in two or
more such cards, at which point you're already well over 4000
processors in a single "computer".
  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=09Z-01S1-00044

It's also good for keeping you warm in the winter.

====================

A state-of-the art brain has on the order of 10^11 neurons and
10^14 synapses, maybe more, operating in parallel, with a total
power dissipation on the order of 100 watts.  It runs at about
10^3 cycles per second, so the number of elementary operations
is rather large.

It's not particularly good at bignum arithmetic, but there are
other things it does rather well.  It has considerable fault
tolerance.  It can be programmed (i.e. taught) to a limited
extent, but this process is not well understood, not at all
similar to modern programming languages.

Looking forward, it's fun to imagine something with the best
of both worlds, including easily-programmable precision as
well as massive parallelism.