In Japan, Fujitsu Ltd has now announced its experimental AP1000 parallel processor, a forerunner of its VPP500 vector parallel monster (CI No 1,946) as a product in its own right. The AP1000 uses the Sparc chip from Sun Microsystems Inc, in configurations of from 16 to 1,024 processors, and features three types of communication networks within the procesor complex to reduce overhead in communication between the processors. Peak performance of the AP1000 in double precision floating point work is put at 88 MFLOPS with 16 processors, rising to up to 5,693 MFLOPS with 1,024 processors. It uses a multiple instruction-multiple data execution control mode from its distributed memory architecture. Fujitsu is targeting mainly academic and research institutions, renting the parallel AP1000 box at from $11,570 a month.
