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Fujitsu's VP Series

In 1977 Fujitsu produced the first supercomputer prototype called the F230-75 APU that was a pipelined vector processor added to a scalar processor. This attached processor was installed in the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission (JAERI) and the National Aerospace Lab (NAL). In 1983 the company came out with the VP-200 and VP-100 systems, which later spun off the low-end VP-50 and VP-30 systems. In 1986 came the VP-400 (with twice as many pipelines as the VP- 200) and as of mid-1987 the whole family became the E-series with the addition of an extra (multiply-add) pipelined floating point unit that boosted the performance potential by 50%. Thanks to the flexible range of systems in this generation (VP-30E to VP-400E), and other reasons such as good marketing and a broad range of applications, Fujitsu became the largest domestic supplier with over 80 systems installed, many of which are now well below the cut-off limit in the TOP500 list.

Available since 1990, the VP-2000 family can offer a peak performance of 5 Gflop/s thanks to a vector cycle time of 3.2 ns. The family was initially announced with four vector performance levels (model 2100, 2200, 2400, and 2600) where each level could have either one of two scalar processors. but the VP-2400/40 doubled this limit offering a peak vector performance similar to the VP-2600. Only the top range of these models are now represented in the Japanese TOP500 list. Previous machines had been heavily criticised for the lack of memory throughput. The VP-400 series had only one load/store path to memory that peaked at 4.57 GB/s. This was improved in the VP-2000 series by doubling the paths so that each pipeline set can do two load/store operations per cycle giving a total transfer rate of 20 GB/s.



top500@rz.uni-mannheim.de
Tue Nov 14 15:13:46 PST 1995