Supercomputers!

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

One of the probelms with supercomputers is that artchitectures are not software friendly. Intel's IA64 being the most extreme example.

I suspect the designers thought that no matter how funky the architecture, the compiler guys could handle it.

I never could get an answer to how many instructions should be conditionalized before it was better to jump around them.

~~ Paul

 

[BenBurch]

My favorite unfriendly supercomputer architecture was the Denelcor HEP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneous_Element_Processor

 

[Dan O.]

How is that different from the CDC peripheral processors of the 70s?

 

[BenBurch]

How is that different from the CDC peripheral processors of the 70s?

Well, they were barrel processors but they switched complete context. Rather like the old Singer partitioned machine. The processes had no awareness of each other. Not suitable for most sorts of parallel processing.