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ILLIAC IV Dead

ILLIAC IV
KindMachine
Introduced1972
Discontinued1981
StatusDead
ManufacturerUIUC / Burroughs
ClassSupercomputer
Platform64 SIMD elements
Sourceen.wikipedia.org ↗

The most ambitious parallel machine of its era — built by Burroughs for UIUC, housed at NASA Ames, famously difficult to program. SIMD before the word existed.

Created by Burroughs Corporation

Daniel Slotnick's ILLIAC IV was designed as four 64-element quadrants of 64-bit processors — only one quadrant was ever built. Burroughs delivered it to NASA Ames in 1972, where it ran for a decade.

It was the largest SIMD machine ever attempted — each PE with its own memory under a single control unit. Programming it required ILLIAC IV FORTRAN and CFD variants; it was hard, but it proved massive parallelism possible.

Sources

  1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILLIAC_IV