Proving ground and driver for innovative architecture and techniques
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Market smaller (about 1%) relative to commercial as multiprocessors become mainstream
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Dominated by vector machines starting in 70s
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Microprocessors have made huge gains in floating-point performance
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high clock rates
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pipelined floating point units (e.g., multiply-add every cycle)
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instruction-level parallelism
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effective use of caches (e.g., automatic blocking)
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Economics of commodity microprocessors
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