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 Scalar may refer to: *Scalar (mathematics), an element of a field, which is used to define a vector space, usually the field of real numbers *Scalar (physics), a physical quantity that can be described by a single element of a number field such a ...

floating point unit A floating-point unit (FPU), numeric processing unit (NPU), colloquially math coprocessor, is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on floating-point numbers. Typical operations are addition, subtraction, multipli ...

s to act as a single

vector processor In computing, a vector processor or array processor is a central processing unit (CPU) that implements an instruction set where its instructions are designed to operate efficiently and effectively on large one-dimensional arrays of data called ...

. 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 Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...

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 The POWER6 is a microprocessor developed by IBM that implemented the Power ISA#Power ISA v.2.05, Power ISA v.2.05. When it became available in systems in 2007, it succeeded the POWER5#POWER5+, POWER5+ as IBM's flagship Power microprocessor. It i ...

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