The Cydra-5 departmental supercomputer is the first

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 popul ...

Cydrome Cydrome (1984–1988) was a computer company established in San Jose, California, 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, a ...

. 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 Homogeneity and heterogeneity are concepts relating to the uniformity of a substance, process or image. A homogeneous feature is uniform in composition or character (i.e., color, shape, size, weight, height, distribution, texture, language, i ...

multiprocessing Multiprocessing (MP) 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. The ...

system. There are two types of processors functionally specialized for different components of

workload The term workload can refer to several different yet related entities. An amount of labor An old definition refers to workload as the amount of work an individual has to do.Jex, S. M. (1998). Stress and job performance: Theory, research, and im ...

. The numerical processor works on numerical computations and uses Cydrome’s "directed-dataflow" architecture, a variant of

VLIW Very long instruction word (VLIW) refers to instruction set architectures that are designed to exploit instruction-level parallelism (ILP). A VLIW processor allows programs to explicitly specify instructions to execute in parallel computing, para ...

. The general-purpose processor is based around the

Motorola 68020 The Motorola 68020 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 t ...

processor, and works on non-numerical instructions to keep the numerical processor free from that work. However, these two processors share memory and peripherals, and the operating system manages both, so the user is presented with the illusion of a uniprocessor system.

Design philosophy

The host processor/attached processor approach was rejected because of its performance limitations.

References

Supercomputers {{Super-compu-stub