California Unveils Plans for Optiputer

The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology will use optical connections to build a supercomputer in which communications lines are faster than the processors the opposite of traditional supercomputing designs.

The idea for the new computer came from the San Diego Supercomputer Center, a research partnership between the University of California at San Diego and the University of California at Irvine. The "optiputer," which will be located at the University of California at San Diego, will initially consist of 500 processors connected with the optical router, which is a product of Chiaro Networks in Richardson, Texas. The system is based on Intel processors running the Linux operating system. New York Times, 17 November 2002 (registration req'd)