The history of SIMD machines began with the ILLIAC IV project, started in 1962. The machine was the first large-scale multiprocessor, composed of 64 64-bit processors.
The project itself was pretty infamous for its failure; estimated costs of $8 million ballooned to $31 million by 1972.
The actual performance of 15 MFLOPS was far below the original estimates of 1000 MFLOPS, partially because only a quarter of the planned machine was ever constructed.
In addition, the machine took another 3 years of engineering to actually work following its delivery to NASA in 1972. Needless to say, the project slowed interest and investigation of SIMD architectures for quite a while.
Eventually, Danny Hillis resurrected the SIMD architecture in 1985 with his Connection Machine.
However, following a short stint in the 80’s by several commercial companies such as Thinking Machines and MasPar, SIMD has once again fallen by the wayside in the arena of commercial general-purpose computing.
đang được dịch, vui lòng đợi..
