"Greg Egan - Crystal Nights" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

double-check the number of digits in the FLOPS rating by counting them
off with one finger. There were a lot more than she’d been expecting, but
she wasn’t seeing double.

“That’s extraordinary,” she said. “Is this whole building packed with
networked processors, with only the penthouse for humans?”

Daniel said, “You tell me. Is it a cluster?”

“Hmm.” So much for not making her jump through hoops, but it wasn’t
really much of a challenge. She ran some different benchmarks, based on
algorithms that were provably impossible to parallelise; however smart the
compiler was, the steps these programs required would have to be carried
out strictly in sequence.

The FLOPS rating was unchanged.

Julie said, “All right, it’s a single processor. Now you’ve got my
attention. Where is it?”

“Turn the keyboard over.”

There was a charcoal-grey module, five centimetres square and five
millimetres thick, plugged into an inset docking bay. Julie examined it, but it
bore no manufacturer’s logo or other identifying marks.

“This connects to the processor?” she asked.

“No. It is the processor.”

“You’re joking.” She tugged it free of the dock, and the wall screen
went blank. She held it up and turned it around, though Daniel wasn’t sure
what she was looking for. Somewhere to slip in a screw-driver and take the
thing apart, probably. He said, “If you break it, you own it, so I hope you’ve
got a few hundred spare.”

“A few hundred grand? Hardly.”
 “A few hundred million.”

Her face flushed. “Of course. If it was two hundred grand, everyone
would have one.” She put it down on the table, then as an afterthought slid it
a little further from the edge. “As I said, you’ve got my attention.”

Daniel smiled. “I’m sorry about the theatrics.”

“No, this deserved the build-up. What is it, exactly?”

“A single, three-dimensional photonic crystal. No electronics to slow it
down; every last component is optical. The architecture was nanofabricated
with a method that I’d prefer not to describe in detail.”