Introducing Replicated VLSI to Supercomputing: the FPS-164/MAX Scientific Computer

Before the advent of VLSI, the implementation of the computational operations required for performing very fast calculations with great accuracy was very expensive. This situation began to change with the development of VLSI circuits for fast 64-bit arithmetic by an American company in mid-1984. Thi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computer (Long Beach, Calif.) Calif.), 1986-03, Vol.19 (3), p.10-23
Main Authors: Charlesworth, A E, Gustafson, J L
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adders
Atmospheric modeling
Business
Central Processing Unit
Computational modeling
Digital arithmetic
Floating-point arithmetic
Logic
Scientific computing
Very large scale integration
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Summary:Before the advent of VLSI, the implementation of the computational operations required for performing very fast calculations with great accuracy was very expensive. This situation began to change with the development of VLSI circuits for fast 64-bit arithmetic by an American company in mid-1984. This advance made it possible to reduce the size of a high-speed floating point data unit from several thousand chips to nine chips. The present paper is concerned with a computer, which, initially delivered in April 1985, represents the first computer to be implemented from replicated VLSI arithmetic parts. It is also the computer to provide several hundred MFLOPs in a supermini-priced processor. Attention is given to the impact of VLSI on number crunching, matrix supercomputing, a matrix supercomputer, and parallel linear algebra. Applications of the new computer are related to structural analysis, computational chemistry,and radar cross sections. (G.R.)
ISSN:0018-9162
1558-0814
DOI:10.1109/MC.1986.1663175