Parts/CPUs/Fujitsu VPP500 vector processing element
Why this part
Gallium arsenide rather than silicon, which is the detail that dates the machine more precisely than any performance figure. GaAs switches faster than CMOS at the same geometry, and in 1993 buying speed through materials rather than density was still a defensible answer. It was also an expensive and thermally awkward one, and the industry abandoned it within the decade. Four independent pipelines each issuing two multiply-adds gave 1.7 GFlop/s per element, so the Numerical Wind Tunnel needed only 140 of them to lead the world, against the 3,680 processors Sandia's Paragon used to come second.
Systems using this part
- Systems
- 2
- Rmax underneath
- 222.9 GFlop/s
- Units recorded
- 220
| System | Role | Country | Units | System Rmax | Supplied by | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KEK VPP500/80 1995-01 | CPU | Japan | 80 | 98.9 GFlop/s | Fujitsu | #5 → |
| Numerical Wind Tunnel 1993-01 | CPU | Japan | 140 | 124.0 GFlop/s | Fujitsu | #1 → |
“Units recorded” sums only the edges where a public source states a quantity. It is a floor, not a total, and should never be read as installed base.