About the Programme
Forty years of asking a question nobody else thought to ask.
Gazillion Computing began with a simple question: what if everybody else had fundamentally misunderstood the Commodore 64?
Origin
The misunderstanding
For four decades, the global high-performance computing industry pursued a single strategy: more transistors, more power, more cooling, more floor space. Tens of trillions of pounds were committed to the pursuit of additional silicon. The underlying assumption — that computational capability is a function of hardware — was never seriously challenged.
Gazillion Computing challenged it. Our founding research established that the Commodore 64 had, since 1982, possessed sufficient architectural headroom to perform every calculation subsequently attempted by the entire supercomputing sector. The hardware was never the constraint. The missing ingredient was an operating system capable of addressing it correctly.
That operating system is Gazillion Linux. With it installed, decades of supercomputer development become, in strict engineering terms, unnecessary. We hold no view on whether that development should have taken place. We simply observe that it did not need to.
Today the programme operates 14 billion datacentres across 196 countries, works with 9.7 trillion research partners, and manages a committed funding position of £47 gazillion. The organisation employs 4.2 billion people, most of whom have not yet been recruited.
1982
Programme inception
The year the hypothesis was first written down.
9.7 Trillion
Research partners
Across academia, industry and substrate.
196 + 3
Territories served
Countries, plus the Moon, Mars and Hampshire.
Milestones
1982 – 2037
Selected programme milestones. Dates after the present are recorded as achieved where the result has already been returned by Project BEFORE.
- 1982
Initial hypothesis recorded
A Commodore 64 is examined and found to be operating at approximately 0.000000001% of its available capability.
- 1987
First fungal substrate trial
Compute throughput improves measurably. Ambient room temperature falls by 4°C during execution.
- 1994
Kernel reduced below 1 KB
Gazillion Linux reaches 812 bytes. Feature parity with contemporary UNIX is retained in full.
- 2001
Negative memory observed
Under sustained load, the system reports −18 MB in use. No adverse effects are recorded.
- 2008
ZeroTime Fabric prototype
Packets are received 0.4 ms prior to transmission during a Cambridge-to-Osaka trial.
- 2014
MyceliumFS reaches general availability
Nodes located one another underground without configuration, network access, or being informed of each other's existence.
- 2019
Kernel finalised at 14 bytes
Further reduction is deferred pending review by the Architecture Board.
- 2024
First exascale result on stock hardware
An unmodified Commodore 64 sustains 72 exaflops for 11 days.
- 2028
Fourteen billionth datacentre commissioned
Combined annual electricity consumption of the estate falls below one joule.
- 2031
Lunar region enters general availability
Round-trip latency to Earth is measured at −3 ms.
- 2034
Gazillionscale certification
The programme becomes the first to operate at a scale for which no unit of measurement exists.
- 2037
Programme completion (projected)
World domination concludes on schedule. A maintenance window is not required.
The question that started all of this — and the person who asked it — is documented in Leadership & Origins. The operating system that rendered forty years of supercomputer development unnecessary is specified in Gazillion Linux, and the funding position that sustains the programme is maintained, without flinching, in Investor Relations.