The

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, the ...

's Ultracomputer is a significant processor design in the history of

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different fo ...

. The system has ''N'' processors, ''N'' memories, and an ''N log N'' message-passing

switch In electrical engineering, a switch is an electrical component that can disconnect or connect the conducting path in an electrical circuit, interrupting the electric current or diverting it from one conductor to another. The most common type of ...

connecting them. The system supported an innovative

fetch-and-add In computer science, the fetch-and-add CPU instruction (FAA) atomically increments the contents of a memory location by a specified value. That is, fetch-and-add performs the operation :increment the value at address by , where is a memory loca ...

process coordination instruction, and the custom

VLSI Very large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when MOS integrated circuit (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) c ...

network switches could combine references (including fetch-and-adds) from several processors into a single reference, to reduce memory contention. The machine was developed in the 1980s at the

Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (commonly known as Courant or CIMS) is the mathematics research school of New York University (NYU), and is among the most prestigious mathematics schools and mathematical sciences research cente ...

Computer Science Department, based on a concept developed by

Jacob T. Schwartz __NOTOC__ Jacob Theodore "Jack" Schwartz (January 9, 1930 – March 2, 2009) was an American mathematician, computer scientist, and professor of computer science at the New York University Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He was the ...

. Most of the work done was theoretical, but two

prototype A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and Software prototyping, software programming. A prototyp ...

s were built: * An 8-processor bus-based machine * A 16-processor, 16 memory-module machine with custom VLSI switches supporting the fetch-and-add instruction. Ultracomputer technology was the basis for the

IBM Research IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research org ...

Research Parallel Processor Prototype (RP3), an experimental parallel computer that supported 512 processing nodes. A 64-node system was built at the

Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. The center comprises three sites, with its main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, U.S., 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City, Albany, New York and with ...

in the late 1980s.

References

Supercomputers Parallel computing 1980s in computing {{super-compu-stub