Extreme computing

[Times art: Mike Sudal]

By ROY C. JONES
© St. Petersburg Times
published June 10, 2002

Just as some athletes push sports to the edge, some gamers are pushing their PCs to blaze through the latest computer games and more.

It's a speed thing. The '50s and '60s had chrome and fast cars. Now, it's computers. Not just any computers, and not just fast. We're talking extreme.

The language of youth, or at least some of them, has changed from overhead cam engines and fuel-injected funny cars to gigahertz, CPUs and megabit-per-second Net connections. The term horsepower has a quaint ring to it now.

Extreme computing is running your game machine with the fastest microprocessor around, using the mobo (motherboard) with the fastest front side bus (an internal electrical pathway) so you can burn through the latest games and whip the online competition.

It's Road Runner, DSL and ISDN. It's downloading megabytes in nanoseconds. It's setting up multiple monitors and blazing home networks. It's Rambus RAM and GForce 4 video cards and SoundBlaster connected to Klipsch or Bose subwoofers that rattle the windows as you blast alien ships out of the solar system.

[Times photo: Scott Keeler] Patrick Voltaggio, 29, of Clearwater poses with a computer, which features neon lighting inside the case, he built from scratch. “I used the Internet to learn how to build computers,” he says.

It's freeing the computer from the gray box with customized cases. It's hot, literally. Instead of the whirring fan that cools a standard PC, some of these machines have water-cooled microprocessors that burst into flames in less than 10 seconds if the cooling fails. It's interactive, and just a little bit dangerous.

At least that's what it is to speed-seeking young people, who say it adds "personality" to their computing. (And to be safe before trying any of this at home, maybe you should check with a whiz kid who knows the ins, outs and dangers.)

"It's like an extension of myself," said Patrick Voltaggio, 29, of Clearwater, who builds systems and customized cases. "It's just very personal instead of an off-the-assembly line PC. All that work I did myself, so pride is a big factor in that."

How do you race a PC? You benchmark it. Think SAT for your CPU. A benchmark program is a utility program that measures a computer's processing speed and component performance using a standardized set of tests so that one computer's performance can be equally compared to that of another. Except the CPU (central processing unit) with the highest score doesn't get in the Ivy League.

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It's better to start out by reading benchmarks rather than trying to run them. Get system information about your computer's CPU and bus speeds from the computer or its documentation and compare that to the benchmarks listed on a site such as Tom's Hardware Page (www.tomshardware.com).

For something a little more advanced, download and run some benchmarking software from Mad Onion (www.madonion.com). Mad Onion is a software developer that offers free or retail versions of popular benchmarking software utilities.

Now that you have seen how your computer compares on a feature-by-feature basis to the latest systems, you have begun to think about buying a new system, haven't you?

Here is the ammunition you need to fight for a new system. You can tell the boss, or your parents or your better half, how poorly your system rates compared with all those others you just discovered. That brings you to a fork in the road: Buy a box or build a box?

Buying a new computer is easier than building one, but less fun. If you are really interested in extreme computing, some cute little box from Computer Depot isn't going to make it.

Check out a system from Falcon Northwest (www.falcon-nw.com) with a brushed aluminum case, AMD Athlon XP processor, four 40-gigabyte RAID configured hard drives, five cooling fans, 1 GB of DDR-SDRAM, a GForce3 Ti 500 video card, huge speakers, monitor and clipped down power cables.

Or perhaps a nice little box from Alienware (www.alienware.com). Similar CPU and video card, lots of fans to remove heat, silver case with unique logo, 22-inch NEC monitor, high-end Audigy sound card from Creative Labs and Klipsch Promedia 5.1 speakers.

You also can set some serious benchmarks with a Voodoo system (www.voodoopc.com). Get the case in black, yellow, blue pearl or red with a side glass and interior illumination. Get the similar components and multiple fans, including a volume control on the main fan, front USB ports and an ATI Radeon video card with 128MB of RAM. That's 128MB of RAM on the video card alone.

Of course if you don't want to lay out the $4,000 to $5,000 for one of these systems and you have some technical knowledge, you might want to build your own extreme computer. Go to a site such as New Egg (www.newegg.com) and price a good motherboard, complete with a fast CPU and chipset. Pick out a case with a large enough power supply, a video card, network interface card, sound card, hard drive, floppy and CD burner, and place your order.

Or check out JDR Computer Products (www.jdr.com) for everything you need to build your computer from bare-bones systems to more advanced boxes. You should be able to put together a hot system for under $1,000 by scaling back on the monitor and speaker systems.

There is a third option, however. Some local computer enthusiasts will build and customize a system for you, such as Voltaggio of Clearwater, one of my former students. He built a solid system with respectable benchmarks for a lot less than those Alienware, Falcon or Voodoo boxes. He not only builds systems but also customizes the cases.

Extreme computing isn't just for young people who love to play the latest game. Extreme computing has always had its academic side, too. Universities and companies have funded research into better and faster computing since the dawn of the information age.

After all, the first Apple, the PS/2 and Windows 3.1 were cutting edge for their time. Check out the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois (www.ncsa.uiuc.edu). Forward thinkers, they came up with a little program in 1992 called Mosaic, the first popular graphical Web browser. It was later commercially developed as Netscape.

Interested in distributed computing where many smaller computers are linked together to work on complex problems? Check out what they are up to at the Indiana University computing department (www.extreme.indiana.edu).

Another great distributed computing effort is the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (www.seti.org). You can download a screen saver program that uses your computer to search for patterns in blocks of data gathered from space. Imagine if your computer was the one that discovered the first evidence of another civilization on a distant planet. Talk about your 15 minutes of fame.

For more information, follow the links previously mentioned or these:

• Maximum PC magazine (www.maximumpc.com)
• CPU: Computer Power User magazine (www.cpumag.com)
• Technology Review magazine (www.technologyreview.com)

-- Roy C. Jones is an adjunct instructor in the business technologies department of St. Petersburg College.

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