ViVA (Virtual Vector Architecture) is a technology from
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
for coupling together multiple
scalar floating point units to act as a single
vector processor. Certain computing tasks are more efficiently handled through vector computations where an instruction can be applied to multiple elements simultaneously, rather than the scalar approach where one instruction is applied to one piece of data at a time. This kind of technology is highly sought after for scientific computing and is IBM's answer to the vector-based
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 pioneered by
Cray
Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed ...
and that was the basis for
NEC
is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered at the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Inte ...
's
Earth Simulator which was the fastest supercomputer in the world 2002-2004.
ViVA was developed and implemented by IBM together with
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a high-performance computing (supercomputer) research facility that was founded in 1974. The National User Facility is operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for th ...
inside the Blue Planet project where they had 8 dual core
POWER5
The POWER5 is a microprocessor developed and fabricated by IBM. It is an improved version of the POWER4. The principal improvements are support for simultaneous multithreading (SMT) and an on-die memory controller. The POWER5 is a dual-core ...
processors made into one vector processor capable of approximately 60-80
GFLOPS of computing power. ViVA technology is in use in the
ASC Purple
ASC Purple was a supercomputer installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. The computer was a collaboration between IBM Corporation and Lawrence Livermore Lab. Announced November 19, 2002, it was installed in ...
supercomputer.
Where ViVA was a software implementation in high-end POWER5 based systems, the second generation, ViVA-2, is directly supported by hardware in the
POWER6 processor.
References
*{{webarchive , date=2013-01-19 , url=https://archive.today/20130119131859/http://news.com.com/IBM+supercomputing+goes+retro/2100-1010_3-5425551.html , title=IBM supercomputing goes retro – CNet
Blue Planet: Extending IBM Power Technology and Virtual Vector Processing – NERSCScience-Driven System Architecture: A New Process for Leadership Class Computing – NERSCAn eCLipz Looms on the Horizon – Real World Technologies
IBM computer hardware