CP-PACS: A massively parallel processor at the University of Tsukuba

Abstract

Computational Physics by Parallel Array Computer System (CP-PACS) is a massively parallel processor developed and in full operation at the Center for Computational Physics at the University of Tsukuba. It is an MIMD machine with a distributed memory, equipped with 2048 processing units and 128 GB of main memory. The theoretical peak performance of CP-PACS is 614.4 Gflops. CP-PACS achieved 368.2 Gflops with the Linpack benchmark in 1996, which at that time was the fastest Gflops rating in the world. CP-PACS has two remarkable features. Pseudo Vector Processing feature (PVP-SW) on each node processor, which can perform high speed vector processing on a single chip superscalar microprocessor; and a 3-dimensional Hyper-Crossbar (3-D HXB) Interconnection network, which provides high speed and flexible communication among node processors. In this article, we present the overview of CP-PACS, the architectural topics, some details of hardware and support software, and several performance results.