US Wizz kids at the University of Maryland have emerged from their labs with a desktop parallel computing system they say is 100 times faster than current PCs.

According to Network World, the computer uses a circuit board about the size of a license plate upon which the boffins have stuck 64 parallel processors.

Supposedly the electronics proved to be ‘not that difficult’, but writing the software which could efficiently use the 64 processors was a bit tricky. The parallel algorithms research community had developed a theory of parallel algorithms called the Parallel Random-Access Model (PRAM). No one took this seriously because it was real egg-head stuff and it had never operated in a real computer before.

However Vishkin said the algorithms the project used made it possible to use 64 processors efficiently for general-purpose computing tasks for the first time.

Vishkin says the prototype device’s physical hardware attributes are “strikingly ordinary” standard computer components executing at 75MHz.

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