{{Short description, Supercomputer
APE100 was a family of
SIMD
Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel computer, parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD describes computers with multiple processing elements that perform the same operation on multiple data points simultaneousl ...
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 developed by the
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare
The Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN; "National Institute for Nuclear Physics") is the coordinating institution for nuclear, particle, theoretical and astroparticle physics in Italy.
History
INFN was founded on the 8th of August 1 ...
(INFN, "National Institute for Nuclear Physics") in Italy between 1989 and 1994. The systems were developed to study the structure of
elementary particle
In particle physics, an elementary particle or fundamental particle is a subatomic particle that is not composed of other particles. The Standard Model presently recognizes seventeen distinct particles—twelve fermions and five bosons. As a c ...
quantum chromodynamics
In theoretical physics, quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the study of the strong interaction between quarks mediated by gluons. Quarks are fundamental particles that make up composite hadrons such as the proton, neutron and pion. QCD is a type of ...
.
APE ("ah-pei"), an acronym for Array Processor Experiment, was the collective name of several generations of massively parallel supercomputers since 1984, optimized for theoretical physics simulations. The APE machines were massively parallel 3D arrays of custom computing nodes with periodic boundary conditions.
APE100 was developed at INFN in Rome and Pisa under the direction of
Nicola Cabibbo
Nicola Cabibbo (10 April 1935 – 16 August 2010) was an Italian physicist best known for his work on the weak interaction, particularly his introduction of the Cabibbo angle. Interested in science from a young age, he studied physics at the Sap ...
. Each node was capable of 50MFLOPS so that the complete configuration with 2,048 nodes had a performance of 100
gigaflops
Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
For such cases, it is a more accurate measur ...
. In 1991, it became the most powerful supercomputer in the world.
A version of APE100 has been marketed by
Alcatel Alenia Space
Thales Alenia Space () is a joint venture between the French technology corporation Thales Group (67%) and Italian defense conglomerate Leonardo (33%). The company is headquartered in Cannes, France.
It provides space-based systems, including ...
under the name of
Quadrics
In mathematics, a quadric or quadric surface is a generalization of conic sections (ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas). In three-dimensional space, quadrics include ellipsoids, paraboloids, and hyperboloids.
More generally, a quadric hyper ...
. After 1994 the project at INFN was continued with the new names APEmille and ApeNext.APE Project in Rome /ref>