] It works like this: The calls are recorded by
] geo-stationary spy satellites and listening stations,
] such as the UK's Menwith Hill, which combine
] satellite-intercepted calls and trunk landline intercepts
] and forward them on to centres, such as the US' Fort
] Meade, where supercomputers work on the recordings in
] real time.

] A SAM-650 product is called a 192 GFLOPS DSP
] supercomputer by TMS. It is just 3U high and has 24 DSP
] chips and is positioned as a back-end number cruncher
] controlled by any standard server - a similar
] architecture to that used by Cray supercomputers. There
] are vast streams of information coming from recorded
] telephone conversations. The ability to have the DSPs
] work in parallel speeds up analysis enormously. Spinning
] hard drives can't feed the DSPs fast enough, nor are they
] quick enough for subsequent software analysis of the
] data. Consequently TMS uses its solid state technology to
] provide a buffer up to 32GB that keeps the DSPs operating
] at full speed.
]
] A cluster of five SAM-650's provides a terra flop of
] processing power; one trillion floating point operations
] per second.

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