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