The first ripples are beginning to appear. Major vendors,
including Intel Corp., Silicon Graphics Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co.
and Microsoft Corp., are quietly collaborating on plans to create a
new type of commercial systems architecture–one we call Computing
Fabrics.
It will combine inexpensive microprocessors from the PC world
with technologies from the world of technical computing, where
massively parallel supercomputers already bring together the power
of hundreds of processors in one machine.