【Fujitsu】 FACOM VP-100 Series

A series of supercomputers from Fujitsu. The vector processor FACOM VP-100 and FACOM VP-200 were announced as the company's first supercomputers in July 1982. These were developed, by exploiting the technology of the FACOM 230-75 APU, with the aim of achieving even higher performance, ease-of-use and affinity with the FACOM M Series of general-purpose computers. The series had the following features:

(1)The VP architecture was defined based on analysis of actual FORTRAN programs
Stress was placed on speeding up not only simple arithmetic operations, but also data sorting and conditional operations.
(2)Vector instructions were executed in a high-speed operation pipeline, and a maximum performance of 500 MFLOPS was achieved with the VP-200
(After announcement, this was enhanced to 571 MFLOPS)
(3)Higher speed was achieved using high-speed semiconductor technology and high-density mounting
-Employed state-of-the-art semiconductor technology -- ECL LSI with a gate delay time of 350ps and 400 and 1300 gates per chip, and high-speed RAM with an access time of 5.5ns
-Newly developed printed circuit board MCC (Multi-Chip Carrier) enabling high-density mounting of 121 LSI including RAM
-Shortened wiring between LSI using a 50cm cubic stack structure
(4)Led the world in achieving a high data transfer capability by using static RAM (64 kilobit SRAM with access time of 55ns) for the main memory unit.

In January 1984, the #1 machine of the FACOM VP-100 Series (FACOM VP-100) began operating at the Nagoya University Plasma Research Center.
Later, the high-end FACOM VP-400, with improved performance, was added, and a processing performance exceeding 1GFLOPS was measured for the first time in the world. Also, the market was expanded by adding lower-end models: the FACOM VP-50 and FACOM VP-30. The FACOM VP Series E Models, enhanced versions of the FACOM VP-100 Series, were announced in July 1987.

FACOM VP-100 Series Specifications
  VP-30 VP-50 VP-100 VP-200 VP-400
Announcement date September 1986 April 1985 July 1982 April 1985
Maximum vector
performance
(MFLOPS)
Figures in parentheses
indicate enhancements
after the initial
announcement
110 142 250
(→ 266→

285)
500
(→ 533→

571)
1142
Vector process-
ing unit
Number of instru-
ctions
Scalar instructions 195
Vector instructions 83
Registers General-
purpose registers
16 (32bit)
Floating
point
registers
8 (64 bit)
Vector registers 32KB 64KB 128KB
Mask
registers
512B 1KB 2KB
Buffer storage
capacity
32KB 64KB
Main device 400, 1300 gates/chip,
delay time 350ps/gate ECL LSI
Access time 5.5ns 4Kbit/module RAM
Main memory unit Memory device Access time 55ns 64Kbit static RAM
Capacity 32/64
/128 MB
64/128
/256 MB
Interleave count 64/128
/128 way
128/256
/256 way
Maximum number of channels 32

(Note) The above specifications are from the time of announcement, and may have been changed due to later improvement.


FACOM VP-400 CPUFACOM VP-50 systemECL (emitter-coupled -logic) LSI used by FACOM VP-100 series, with up to 1,400 or 400 gates (front center LSI)
  
3D Stack, which can mount up to 13 or 15 MCCs and two side panels having newly developed ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) connectors for connecting signals between MCCs. MCC mounts max. 121 LSIs. The photo is Stack of VP series E model, which mounts 15 MCCs.