As promised this July (CI No 1,974), Fujitsu Ltd has released its new VPP500 series of vector parallel processors – claiming them to be the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The VPP500 system features a series of 1.6 GigaFLOPS vector processors, in parallel configurations of from seven to 222, offering performances of 11.2 to 355 GFLOPS – the nodes can be added one at a time. The VPP500 features virtual global memory space to offer the user maximum system memory capacity of more than 50Gb. The individual processing elements are fabricated using Fujitsu’s 25,000-gate Gallium Arsenide arrays – Fujitsu makes GaAs arrays under a second-source pact with Vitesse Semiconductor Corp – and 72,000-gate BiCMOS arrays. Each element combines large capacity vector units and long instruction word RISC processor scalar units and boasts up to 256Mb of static RAM. A crossbar network connects the processors at 800Mbytes per second. The activities of all the processing elements is handled by up to two 128Mb control processers, with long instruction word RISC processors and transfer rates of 2.1Gbps. The VPP500’s operating system, Fujitsu’s UXP/VPP, is based on Unix System V.4, and supports Fortran 77, Network Queuing System and floating point IEEE format, for compatibility with other mainframe and supercomputers. It also has a built-in fault detection system which effectively off-lines defective elements, while the remainder continue operations. The VPP500 is aimed specifically at grand challenge scientific and technical applications such as oil exploration, engine design aerospace, environmental analysis, and molecular design where, Fujitsu claims, it will help to realise hitherto impossible tasks. Prices start at UKP5m for the entry-level seven-processor model high-end models will be priced on a bid basis, although $125m is suggested as the price for a 222-processor models. Commercial shipments start in one year’s time. Its target is 20 Japanese and 30 international sales over three years. It claims to be number two in supercomputers with more than 160 machines installed.
