The ILLIAC III was a fine-grained
SIMD
Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD can be internal (part of the hardware design) and it can be directly accessible through an instruction set architecture (ISA), but it shoul ...
pattern recognition
Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. It has applications in statistical data analysis, signal processing, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, computer graphics ...
computer built by the
University of Illinois
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...
in 1966.
This ILLIAC's initial task was image processing of bubble chamber experiments used to detect nuclear particles. Later it was used on biological images.
The machine was destroyed in a fire, caused by a
Variac
An autotransformer is an electrical transformer with only one winding. The "auto" (Greek for "self") prefix refers to the single coil acting alone, not to any kind of automatic mechanism. In an autotransformer, portions of the same winding act as ...
shorting on one of the wooden-top benches, in 1968. It was rebuilt in the early 1970s, and the core parallel-processing element of the machine, the Pattern Articulation Unit, was successfully implemented. In spite of this and the productive exploration of other advanced concepts, such as multiple-radix arithmetic, the project was eventually abandoned.
Bruce H. McCormick
Bruce Howard McCormick (1928–2007) was an American computer scientist, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Computer Science, and founding director of the Brain Networks Lab at Texas A&M University.
Biography
McCormick took his BS in Physic ...
was the leader of the project throughout its history.
File:ILLIAC III IMG 4178.jpg
File:ILLIAC III IMG 4177.jpg, Printed circuits of the type used in ILLIAC III
File:ILLIAC III IMG 4176.jpg, Printed circuits of the type used in ILLIAC III
See also
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ORDVAC
The ORDVAC (''Ordnance Discrete Variable Automatic Computer)'', is an early computer built by the University of Illinois for the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground. A successor to the ENIAC (along with EDVAC built earlier). ...
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ILLIAC I
The ILLIAC I (Illinois Automatic Computer), a pioneering computer in the ILLIAC series of computers built in 1952 by the University of Illinois, was the first computer built and owned entirely by a United States educational institution.
Compute ...
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ILLIAC II
The ILLIAC II was a revolutionary super-computer built by the University of Illinois that became operational in 1962.
Description
The concept, proposed in 1958, pioneered Emitter-coupled logic (ECL) circuitry, pipelining, and transistor memor ...
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ILLIAC IV
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 cons ...
External links
Advanced Computer Architecture I - Dan Hammerstrom(PDF) See page 30.
SIMD - CS 433 - UC San Diego CS Dept. - Andrew A. Chien(PS) See page 5.
{{Mainframes
One-of-a-kind computers
SIMD computing