http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1410283148

Limits in Computing Power

In its few decades of existence, digital computer performance has increased staggeringly. In the 1930s, computers performed operations a few per second; the largest contemporary machines are approaching 100 million per second. Most of this ratio of 8 orders of magnitude--has come from advances in electronic technology--relays to vacuum tubes to discrete solid state circuits to integrated microcircuits; some has come from internal logical organization and system architecture. Ultimately, the principles of physics must limit computer speeds. This paper, drawing on a number of research results, attempts to estimate the performance yet possible to achieve; but to put the subject in context, the authors briefly review some problems which demand super computers.

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