The VP2000 was the second series of

vector Vector most often refers to: * Euclidean vector, a quantity with a magnitude and a direction * Disease vector, an agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism Vector may also refer to: Mathematics a ...

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

s from Fujitsu. Announced in December 1988, they replaced Fujitsu's earlier FACOM VP Model E Series. The VP2000 was succeeded in 1995 by the VPP300, a

massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of ...

supercomputer with up to 256 vector processors. The VP2000 was similar in many ways to their earlier designs, and in turn to the

Cray-1 The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Cray Research. Announced in 1975, the first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. Eventually, eighty Cray-1s were sold, making it one of the ...

, using a

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-based vector processor for performance. For additional performance the vector units supported a special multiply-and-add instruction that could retire two results per clock cycle. This instruction "chain" is particularly common in many supercomputer applications. Another difference is that the main scalar units of the processor ran at half the speed of the vector unit. According to

Amdahl's Law In computer architecture, Amdahl's law (or Amdahl's argument) is a formula that shows how much faster a task can be completed when more resources are added to the system. The law can be stated as: "the overall performance improvement gained by ...

computers tend to run at the speed of their slowest unit, and in this case unless the program spent most of its time in the vector units, the slower scalar performance would make it 1/2 the performance of a Cray-1 at the same speed. The reason for this seemingly odd "feature" is unclear. One of the major complaints about the earlier VP series was their limited memory bandwidth—while the machines themselves had excellent performance in the processors, they were often starved for data. For the VP2000 series this was addressed by adding a second load/store unit to the scalar units, doubling memory bandwidth. Several versions of the machines were sold at different price points. The low-end VP2100 ran at an 8 ns cycle time and delivered only 0.5 GFLOPS (about 4-8 times the performance of a Cray), while the VP2200 and VP2400 decreased the cycle time to 4 ns and delivered between 1.25 and 2.5 GFLOPS peak. The high-end VP2600 ran at 3.2 ns and delivered 5 GFLOPS. All of the models came in the /10 versions with a single scalar processor, or the /20 with a second, while the 2200 and 2400 also came in a /40 configuration with four. Due to the additional load/store units, adding additional scalar units improved performance by increasing memory bandwidth, as well as allowing several programs to run at the same time and thereby increase the chance there was something to process on the vector unit. Each unit is said to increase performance 1.5 times, allowing the VP2400/40 to match the performance of the earlier VP2600/20. The machines were supplied with either the

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

-compatible UXP/M or the

MVS Multiple Virtual Storage, more commonly called MVS, is the most commonly used operating system on the System/370, System/390 and IBM Z IBM mainframe computers. IBM developed MVS, along with OS/VS1 and SVS, as a successor to OS/360. It is unr ...

-compatible VSP/S

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s, both supplied by

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. The later was used for Fortran programs while the former was typically used for C, and vectorizing compilers were supplied for both languages. Like most companies, Fujitsu turned to massive parallelism for future machines, and the VP2000 family were not on the market for very long. Nevertheless, over 100 were sold, and in July 1993, there were 180 installed.

References

{{Fujitsu Vector supercomputers Fujitsu supercomputers