Soviet Cybernetics Technology—XI

A review and evaluation of the first Soviet book entirely devoted to problems of high-productivity computing systems. Published in late 1966, the book reports on studies conducted at the Institute of Mathematics in Novosibirsk. Since the Soviet system of national economic planning requires a volume of coordinated, relatively simple calculations, and Soviet computer technology does not equal that of the West, the authors, E. V. Evreinov and Yu G. Kosarev, have sought a way to increase computer productivity without greatly increasing technological demands. Their solution is parallelism: the coupling of 1000 computers, each capable of a million operations per second, so that all work together on the same program at the same time. However, the authors have not succeeded in establishing a new approach based on parallelism that will solve the problems of increased productivity, nor have they made a convincing case for their basic assumptions. The proposed linking of 1000 branch computers to achieve the desired running speed is not feasible, nor is the use of homogeneous computing media to develop the microstructure of a system. Methods of controlling and monitoring parallel algorithms are not considered. Although all theoretical conclusions were supposedly verified on the experimental Minsk-222 system, the actual results are not documented and there is no clear description of the operations performed. (For translated excerpts, see P-3600/5.) 33 pp.