The scalability of the RWC-built 64 PC cluster has been impressive, according to outside organizations' benchmarking, and the RWC remains a good way for foreign participants to engage Japanese researchers. If the RWC quietly changes direction, they will be judged based on their original goals and be deemed a failure. Each participating organization has a lab set up locally for RWC research. RWC is the first major Japanese information technology program that seriously attempted to integrate researchers from outside Japan, and several countries submitted project proposals. TRC, the central facility, contains six laboratories.
Distributed laboratories are as follows.
This is suitable for applications that require efficient processing according to pre-defined algorithms. However, the majority of information in the real world is pattern information, spatially and temporally distributed and characterized by diversity and ambiguity. The RWC project therefore is attempting to add information integration and learning abilities similar to those of the human brain to current information processing technologies. Enabling humans to communicate easily with computers is the major application example. 1.2 Parallel and Distributed Computing Early in the 21st century, improvements in processor chip speed are likely to reach the physical limits of device technology.