SEATTLE – When Robert Trout wants to illustrate cryptography’s particular need for speed, he tells the story of the Enigma encryption engine.
In 1942 mathematician Alan Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park, England’s code-breaking headquarters, had reverse-engineered the Enigma, a German encoding device, and the Allies started reading Axis battle plans. Suspecting trouble, the Nazis responded by upgrading from a three-gear machine to a four-gear version. Breaking their codes suddenly took 26 times as long–days instead of hours–and the Allies’ destroyers could no longer intercept the U-boats torpedoing cargo ships in the Atlantic. Hundreds of vessels were sunk. London starved for months until the codes were finally untangled again – with the help of some of the world’s first electronic computers.
The lesson of that war story: Sometimes every second of an arithmetic operation counts. “Cracking ciphers is the kind of interesting task that pushed human ingenuity to invent computers,” says Trout, 65. “We believe it’s the kind of problem that can push us to develop computing’s next step, too.”
Pico Computing, the Seattle firm that Trout founded in 2004, sells a desktop-size supercomputer aimed at the modern-day equivalent of Bletchley Park’s cipher-geeks: military and government agencies that need to turn scrambled messages into actionable intelligence, along with anyone else performing similar time-sensitive, mathematically monstrous tasks. The 15-person company’s secret weapon is a decades-old form of chip that, revamped by Pico and tamed by the right programmers, can be far more efficient and powerful than the fastest processors in HP’s and IBM’s supercomputers.
Field programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, are the silicon equivalent of newborn babes – tough to communicate with, but infinitely malleable. Unlike the modern microprocessor, they can’t be programmed with easily managed but inefficient languages like C or Java, command sets that are designed to do everything from manipulating Excel spreadsheets to running websites. Instead, they have to be controlled at the most rudimentary level, the electric gates that carry an “on” or “off” signal.
That makes programming them vastly more difficult but also means that they can be designed to do exactly one thing well, instead of doing many things passably. Set FPGAs to perform a specific computing task–particularly one that involves making many computations simultaneously – and they’re often a hundred or even a thousand times as fast as the chips built by Intel or AMD, processors that are generically designed to handle any application. “We’ve stripped out all the fancy stuff that’s been added to processors over the last 30 years,” says Trout. “We got rid of the stereo system and the seats and turned the family sedan into a race car.”
a>>
