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Cydra-5
The Cydra-5 departmental supercomputer is the first minisupercomputer designed by Cydrome. It was completed in 1987. At that time Cydra-5 cost from $0.5 million to $1 million, but achieved one-half the performance of contemporary supercomputers which cost around 10 times as much, $10 million to $20 million. The Cydra-5 is a heterogeneous multiprocessing system. There are two types of processors functionally specialized for different components of workload. The numerical processor works on numerical computations and uses Cydrome’s "directed-dataflow" architecture, a variant of VLIW. The general purpose processor is based around the Motorola 68020 The Motorola 68020 ("''sixty-eight-oh-twenty''", "''sixty-eight-oh-two-oh''" or "''six-eight-oh-two-oh''") is a 32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1984. A lower-cost version was also made available, known as the 68EC020. In keepin ... processor, and works on non-numerical instructions to keep the numerical processor free ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cydrome
Cydrome (1984−1988) was a computer company established in San Jose of the Silicon Valley region in California. Its mission was to develop a numeric processor. The founders were David Yen, Wei Yen, Ross Towle, Arun Kumar, and Bob Rau (the chief architect). History The company was originally named ”Axiom Systems". However another company in San Diego called "Axiom" was founded earlier. Axiom Systems called its architecture "SPARC". It sold the rights to the name (but not the architecture) to Sun Microsystems and used the money to hire NameLab to come up with a new company name. They came up with "Cydrome" from "cyber" (computer) "drome" (racecourse). Cydrome moved from an office in San Jose to a business park in Milpitas on President's Day 1985. This site was used to host meetings of the Bay Area ACM chapter's Special Interest Group in Large Scale Systems (SIGBIG), in contrast to then SIGSMALL for microcomputers which are now called "PCs" and its present-day national SI ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Heterogeneous Computing
Heterogeneous computing refers to systems that use more than one kind of processor or cores. These systems gain performance or energy efficiency not just by adding the same type of processors, but by adding dissimilar coprocessors, usually incorporating specialized processing capabilities to handle particular tasks. Heterogeneity Usually heterogeneity in the context of computing referred to different instruction-set architectures (ISA), where the main processor has one and other processors have another - usually a very different - architecture (maybe more than one), not just a different microarchitecture ( floating point number processing is a special case of this - not usually referred to as heterogeneous). In the past heterogeneous computing meant different ISAs had to be handled differently, while in a modern example, Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) systems eliminate the difference (for the user) while using multiple processor types (typically CPUs and GPUs), us ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minisupercomputer
Minisupercomputers constituted a short-lived class of computers that emerged in the mid-1980s, characterized by the combination of vector processing and small-scale multiprocessing. As scientific computing using vector processors became more popular, the need for lower-cost systems that might be used at the departmental level instead of the corporate level created an opportunity for new computer vendors to enter the market. As a generalization, the price targets for these smaller computers were one-tenth of the larger supercomputers. Several notable technical, economic, and political attributes characterize minisupercomputers. First, they were architecturally more diverse than prior mainframes and minicomputers in hardware and less diverse in software. Second, advances in VLSI made them less expensive (mini-price). These machines were market targeted to be cost-effective and quickly manufactured. Third, it is notable who did not manufacture minisupercomputers: within the USA, IB ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multiprocessing
Multiprocessing is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. There are many variations on this basic theme, and the definition of multiprocessing can vary with context, mostly as a function of how CPUs are defined ( multiple cores on one die, multiple dies in one package, multiple packages in one system unit, etc.). According to some on-line dictionaries, a multiprocessor is a computer system having two or more processing units (multiple processors) each sharing main memory and peripherals, in order to simultaneously process programs. A 2009 textbook defined multiprocessor system similarly, but noting that the processors may share "some or all of the system’s memory and I/O facilities"; it also gave tightly coupled system as a synonymous term. At the operating system level, ''multiprocessing'' is som ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Workload
The term workload can refer to a number of different yet related entities. An amount of labor Workload is the amount of work an individual has to do.Jex, S. M. (1998). Stress and job performance: Theory, research, and implications for managerial practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. There is a distinction between the actual amount of work and the individual's perception of the workload. Workload can also be classified as quantitative (the amount of work to be done) or qualitative (the difficulty of the work). The assessment of operator workload has a vital impact on the design of new human-machine systems. By evaluating operator workload during the design of a new system, or iteration of an existing system, problems such as workload bottleneck (project management), bottlenecks and Mechanical overload (engineering), overload can be identified. As the human operator is a central part of a human-machine system, the correction of these problems is necessary for the operation of safe and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
VLIW
Very long instruction word (VLIW) refers to instruction set architectures designed to exploit instruction level parallelism (ILP). Whereas conventional central processing units (CPU, processor) mostly allow programs to specify instructions to execute in sequence only, a VLIW processor allows programs to explicitly specify instructions to execute in parallel. This design is intended to allow higher performance without the complexity inherent in some other designs. Overview The traditional means to improve performance in processors include dividing instructions into substeps so the instructions can be executed partly at the same time (termed ''pipelining''), dispatching individual instructions to be executed independently, in different parts of the processor (''superscalar architectures''), and even executing instructions in an order different from the program ('' out-of-order execution''). These methods all complicate hardware (larger circuits, higher cost and energy use) becau ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Motorola 68020
The Motorola 68020 ("''sixty-eight-oh-twenty''", "''sixty-eight-oh-two-oh''" or "''six-eight-oh-two-oh''") is a 32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1984. A lower-cost version was also made available, known as the 68EC020. In keeping with naming practices common to Motorola designs, the 68020 is usually referred to as the "020", pronounced "oh-two-oh" or "oh-twenty". The 020 was in the market for a relatively short time. The Motorola 68030 was announced in September 1986 and began deliveries in the summer of 1987. Priced about the same as the 020 of the time, the 030 was significantly faster and quickly replaced in 020 in almost every use. History 68000 and 68010 At the time the Motorola 68000 was designed, Motorola's design and fabrication services were outdated. Although even small companies like MOS Technologies and Zilog had moved on to silicon gate depletion mode NMOS logic on ever-larger wafers, Motorola was still using metal gates and enhancement mode a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
