Al DiMora, who made a name for himself as the head of a now-defunct Carpinteria company that made custom cars for the rich, has founded a business in Utah that is promising to revolutionize computers and electronics in ways that will be felt at all levels of society.
Star Bridge Systems says its HAL-4rW1 hypercomputer is three times faster than the most powerful supercomputers now in use, and will be available for $26 million--about one-quarter of the cost of bigger, slower competitors. But the hypercomputer--which its creator says may be capable of attaining self-consciousness--is just the beginning. HAL was built to demonstrate the enormous potential of a new way of using computer chips that, if the company's claims are true, will be embraced by companies making everything from toaster ovens to automobiles to satellites.
The company's claims do sound plausible when explained by HAL's inventor and company co-founder, Kent Gilson, a 33-year-old high school dropout. Gilson, who has spent the last 15 years working in a discipline known as reconfigurable computing, says he's found a way to get the most out of the concept. Computers have traditionally used two types of computer chips: slower ones that are designed to handle a large number of tasks, and speedy, application-specific chips that are tailored to do a specific job. Intel's Pentium chip, the heart of many personal computers, is an example of a versatile chip that can handle many different jobs. The price is a loss of speed. Chips like those on a graphics accelerator card--a device that allows personal computers to handle video and games--are hard-wired to do that job, and do it fast. These hard-wired chips, called application specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, are expensive to design. A cheaper alternative is a reconfigurable chip called a field programmable gate array (FPGA), which can be reconfigured to act like an ASIC. The chips were an exciting enough development to merit a cover story in the June, 1997 issue of Scientific American.
Star Bridge Systems has developed hardware and software that allows FPGA chips already on the market to be reconfigured as many as 1,000 times per second. HAL uses 280 FPGAs on 36 integrated circuit boards, and the company claims it can perform 12.84 trillion operations per second. That makes it nearly 10 times faster than the Blue Mountain, the supercomputer used by Los Alamos National Laboratory to simulate nuclear explosions. IBM's $94 million Blue Pacific, which does 3.9 trillion calculations at best, uses 5,856 Power PC chips and takes of 8,000 square feet. HAL isn't much bigger than a personal computer.
The key to getting that much power out of so little hardware is software written by Gilson called Viva. "Up to a thousand times per second, Viva inventories available resources, both in hardware and software, and automatically selects the most efficient available resource to perform each function required to complete the computer's task, trading one resource off with another, as needed, in order to maintain maximum efficient use of all resources," according to information the company distributes on its web site.
In a device like a satellite, a personal computer, a camera or an automobile, it allows one FPGA chip to act like many ASICs, increasing computational power and cutting costs, weight and power consumption. Al Dimora's brother, Frank, a long-time Lompoc resident, prophecy expert and author, sees HAL's capabilities and its potential use as a tool for increasing mankind's knowledge as another sign that the return of Christ to Earth will happen sooner than some were expecting. HAL is "fulfilling part of Daniel's prophecy that knowledge will increase before the Lord returns. They weren't expecting this kind of computer to hit the scene for 10, 20, 50 years."