Intel IPSC

Intel IPSC

Multiprocessor Systems

Published in Naim A. Kheir, Systems Modeling and Computer Simulation, 2018

The Intel iPSC/860 is an MIMD multiprocessor system. The number of processor elements can be scaled from 8 to 128 for a peak performance of 7 GFLOPS on 64 bit operands. Each of the iPSC/860 processors functions independently and shares data via a direct connect network (DCN) TM.

Personal reflections on 50 years of scientific computing: 1967–2017

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Journal Information

Published in International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems, 2020

Layne T. Watson

This decade also saw the emergence of parallel computing in almost every conceivable flavor, a truly exciting period for computer and computational scientists. Alas, the market could not sustain this cornucopia of parallel architectures, and almost all the companies and/or products failed. I lost this decade working on the Elxsi 6400 (the first parallel machine at Sandia National Laboratories in 1984), Intel iPSC-32 (the ‘hypercube’, serial number 2, at General Motors Research Laboratories in Warren, Michigan), NCUBE-10 (the company sold numerous machines but went out of business without ever producing a working FORTRAN compiler), Sequent Balance 21,000, Sequent Symmetry S81, Cray 2, Cray Y-MP C90, Intel Paragon XP/S, SGI Origin 2000. Despite the commercial failure of parallel computing, the community learned a lot about parallel programming, interconnection topologies, communication technologies, and the tradeoffs between shared and distributed memory systems. The community also learned that parallel programming was, and still is, very hard.

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Multiprocessor Systems

Personal reflections on 50 years of scientific computing: 1967–2017