Fujitsu Ltd has developed an accelerator device for its Sparc-based AP1000 parallel processor. The Numerical Calculation Accelerator Option, consists of specially designed chips Fujitsu’s MB92831 and 4M-bit static RAM memory. The AP1000 is based on Sparc chips, up to a maximum of 1,024 of them. In a configuration of 512 processors, Fujitsu says the accelerator option increases the processing speed by a factor of 18, to reach 542 cycles per second. Each Accelerator works for two processors. Shipments are to start from January next year. While companies such as NCube Inc and Thinking Machines Corp already have commercial parallel processors on the market, in Japan both Fujitsu and NEC Corp have preferred to invest research time in building their own versions. Fujitsu aims to target research institutes.
