🔗 The Illiac IV Computer

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

The ILLIAC IV was the first massively parallel computer. The system was originally designed to have 256 64-bit floating point units (FPUs) and four central processing units (CPUs) able to process 1 billion operations per second. Due to budget constraints, only a single "quadrant" with 64 FPUs and a single CPU was built. Since the FPUs all had to process the same instruction – ADD, SUB etc. – in modern terminology the design would be considered to be single instruction, multiple data, or SIMD.

The concept of building a computer using an array of processors came to Daniel Slotnick while working as a programmer on the IAS machine in 1952. A formal design did not start until 1960, when Slotnick was working at Westinghouse Electric and arranged development funding under a US Air Force contract. When that funding ended in 1964, Slotnick moved to the University of Illinois and joined the Illinois Automatic Computer (ILLIAC) team. With funding from Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), they began the design of a newer concept with 256 64-bit processors instead of the original concept with 1,024 1-bit processors.

While the machine was being built at Burroughs, the university began building a new facility to house it. Political tension over the funding from the US Department of Defense led to the ARPA and the University fearing for the machine's safety. When the first 64-processor quadrant of the machine was completed in 1972, it was sent to the NASA Ames Research Center in California. After three years of thorough modification to fix various flaws, ILLIAC IV was connected to the ARPANet for distributed use in November 1975, becoming the first network-available supercomputer, beating the Cray-1 by nearly 12 months.

Running at half its design speed, the one-quadrant ILLIAC IV delivered 50 MFLOP peak, making it the fastest computer in the world at that time. It is also credited with being the first large computer to use solid-state memory, as well as the most complex computer built to date, with over 1 million gates. Generally considered a failure due to massive budget overruns, the design was instrumental in the development of new techniques and systems for programming parallel systems. In the 1980s, several machines based on ILLIAC IV concepts were successfully delivered.