ILLIAC
ILLIAC (Illinois Automatic Computer) is the name of a series of mainframe computers that were built between 1951 and 1974 and take their name from the University of Illinois , where the first computer in the series was built.
At the end of the 1940s, as in many other places in the USA, development work for computers was carried out at the University of Illinois based on the concept presented by John von Neumann and others ( First Draft Report on the EDVAC , 1945, Von-Neumann-Architektur ). The result was the ORDVAC , which was delivered to the US Army's Ballistics Research Center in the Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1951. This was followed by the order for another computer, the Illiac I , which went into operation in September 1952 and was the first computer with Von Neumann architecture at a US university. The development laboratory at the University of Illinois was directed by Nathan M. Newmark .
The Illiac I followed the same design as the ORDVAC, had 2800 electron tubes and a drum memory. It was in operation until 1963.
In 1962, the successor, the Illiac II, went into operation, which was fully transistorized and had a pipeline architecture . The design work began in 1958, one of the computer architects was Donald B. Gillies , who also used the computer to search for Mersenne prime numbers and thus set a prime number record at the time.
The Illiac III was a SIMD computer especially for image processing, first of bubble chamber images, then in biology. It went into operation in 1966, but was destroyed by fire in 1968.
The Illiac IV was one of the first parallel computers . It was of the vector processor type with up to 256 processors. The development work lasted over 10 years, and when the computer was finished in 1976 it was overtaken by technical developments ( Cray-1 - supercomputer ). The Illiac IV emerged from the Solomon project at Westinghouse , whose chief designer David Slotnick went to Burroughs after the end of the project and initiated development in cooperation with the University of Illinois. After the first draft in 1966 there have been several delays, including through student unrest in the late 1960s, in 1970 a shift of the development center to Moffett Field in California ( Ames Research Center of NASA required). After that there were problems with the reliability, so that the computer was not fully functional until 1975, even after its official completion in 1972. Until about 1981 it was the fastest computer in the world for the special, easily parallelizable hydrodynamic problems for which it was used at NASA. In 1982 it went out of service. Burroughs still used the technology in their Parallel Element Processing Ensemble (PEPE) for the US Department of Defense, which should calculate the orbits of ICBMs fired on the US in an emergency . The experience with the Illiac IV influenced early parallel computer research. The Illiac IV was also the first computer in which the memory consisted only of semiconductor components.
Even after several supercomputer projects were the University of Illinois with the name ILLIAC, for example, the CEDAR project of David Kuck , a 1988 finished Symmetric Multiprocessor system (sometimes ILLIAC V) informed the ILLIAC 6 of 2005 or the Linux - Cluster Trusted llliac 2006 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Chapter Illiac IV in Siewiorek, Gordon Bell, Newell Computer Structures
- ^ Computer History Museum, Semiconductor Memory . The 64 processors used 256 bit bipolar SRAM from Fairchild Semiconductor.