Gigaflop architecture, a hardware perspective

Any super computer built in the early 1980s will use components that are available by fall 1978. The architecture of such a system cannot depart radically from current super computers if the software experience painfully acquired from these computers in the 70's is to apply. Given the above constraints, 10 billion floating point operations per second (BFLOPS) are attainable and a problem memory of 512 million (64 bit) words could be supported by the technology of the time. In contrast to this, industry is likely to respond with commercially available machines with a performance of less than 150 MFLOPS. This is due to self-imposed constraints on the manufacturers to provide upward compatible architectures (same instruction set) and systems which can be sold in significant volumes. Since this computing speed is inadequate to meet the demands of computational fluid dynamics, a special processor is required. Issues which are felt to be significant in the pursuit of maximum compute capability in this special processor are discussed.