The ILLIAC III was a fine-grained
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 ...
pattern recognition
Pattern recognition is the task of assigning a class to an observation based on patterns extracted from data. While similar, pattern recognition (PR) is not to be confused with pattern machines (PM) which may possess PR capabilities but their p ...
computer built by the
University of Illinois
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United ...
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
In electrical engineering, an autotransformer is an electrical transformer with only one winding. The "auto" (Greek for "self") prefix refers to the single coil acting alone. In an autotransformer, portions of the same winding act as both the pri ...
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 was the leader of the project throughout its history.
John P. Hayes was responsible for the logic design of the input-output channel control units.
[
]
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
*
ORDVAC
*
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 ...
*
ILLIAC II
The ILLIAC II was a revolutionary super-computer built by the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, University of Illinois that became operational in 1962.
Description
The concept, proposed in 1958, pioneered Emitter-coupled logic (ECL) ...
*
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 ...
References
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