At the recent AAAI conference at Stanford, it became apparent that many new AI research centers are being established around the country in industrial and governmental settings and in universities that have not paid much attention to Al in the past. What does an AI researcher want from his computing facility? What will make him most productive? In fact, the needs of the Al researcher are not very different from the needs of any other researcher in computer science, except that facility-related problems seem to become acute in AI a few years sooner than they are felt in other research areas The considerations are roughly as follows: 0 AI programs tend to be very large because they contain, in one form or another, a lot of knowledge. It follows, then, that any machine used for AI must provide a large virtual address space in order to insulate the researcher from having to think about how to chop up his task into smaller tidbits and overlays.

At the recent AAAI conference at Stanford, it became apparent that many new AI research centers are being established around the country in industrial and governmental settings and in universities that have not paid much attention to AI in the past. At the same time, many of the established AI centers are in the process of converting from older facilities, primarily based on Decsystem-10 and Decsystem-20 machines, to a variety of newer options. At present, unfortunately, there is no simple answer to the question of what machines, operating systems, and languages a new or upgrading AI facility should use, and this situation has led to a great deal of confusion and anxiety on the part of those researchers and administrators who are faced with making this choice. In this article I will survey the major alternatives available at present and those that are clearly visible on the horizon, and I will try to indicate the advantages and disadvantages of each for AI work. This is mostly information that we have gathered at CMU in the course of planning for our own future computing needs, but the opinions expressed are my own.