For many years, consumer spending on high-tech toys has been growing at a rate far faster than the relatively stagnant supercomputing industry. By the second half of the 1990s, the sales of even a single moderately successful high-tech consumer toy such as the Tamagotchi, Playstation2, GameBoy, or Furby greatly outstripped the revenues of all supercomputing products combined. The competition for the consumer high-tech toy market is fierce and well-funded, and the impetus to provide ever more powerful products to maintain or increase market share has resulted in the computing power found in children's toys making proportionately far greater strides than have been seen in even the most aggressive conventional supercomputing technologies.



FURBEOWULF

highly parallel processing system Since the introduction of the original Cray-1 in 1976 with a computing power of 133 million floating-point operations per second (megaflops), a quarter-century of R&D efforts have only pushed the performance envelope of Cray's current top-of-the-line SV1ex-based systems to to the 64,000 megaflop range. Improving performance by a factor of nearly five hundred may well be no small accomplishment, but in the same twenty-five years, the consumer toy market has gone from sub-microflop offerings like the Pet Rock, early model GI Joe action figures, and unipixel displays such as "mood rings" to the current crop of "virtual pets," handheld GameBoy play systems, and, the subject of our research, the Furby. The computing power of a single Furby still lags behind even Cray Computing's mid-range 2 gigaflop supercomputers, but it is, nonetheless, infinitely more powerful than a Pet Rock and carries a somewhat lower cost-of-ownership than the Cray, particularly when you take into account the price and availability of spares and replacements. When Linux was first ported to the Furby platform, it suffered from significant stability and performance problems, which gave the Furby an unfortunate reputation as being unsuitable for enterprise-level computing. The conversion of the IRS and NASA computing facilities to Furby-based platforms towards the end of 1999 was seen by many as premature and may have contributed to the problems experienced by those departments during 2000 which did nothing to improve the Furby's image in corporate America. To be fair, however, it should be noted that Furbys placed in IRS telephone support positions received no more complaints than their human counterparts and studies showed that they provided a comparable level of accuracy in their answers to taxpayer questions. Subsequent releases of Furby Linux have largely addressed these problems and, though the flexibility of the user interface and the support for third-party add-on hardware remains limited, this is primarily a handicap for standard desktop applications like spreadsheets or graphic design, and does not pose a problem for the back-end CPU-intensive parallel processing applications typical of cluster computing.

Inexpensive Aibo-clone running Wagtek's MojoBARC processor One unfortunate design flaw that did pose a problem is that the Furby's networking interface operates exclusively in broadcast mode with no provision for collision detection and arbitration, routing, or other control features necessary to network more than two or three Furbys together effectively. This required the use of a "watchdog" processor to manage both process allocation and network traffic; an inexpensive Aibo-clone based on Wagtek's powerful MojoBARC CPU was selected for this purpose.