Peak vs. Sustained Performance in Highly Concurrent Vector Machines
James · Computer · 1986
Recent announcements of the NEC SX-2 vector processor, the Cray Research CRAY-2 vector multiprocessor, and the ETA-10 vector multiprocessor have undoubtedly attracted much attention considering their respective peak computational rates of 1300, 1950, and 9600 Mflops (Millions of FLoating point Operations Per Second). These announcements have followed several other scientific computer announcements, each of which has emphasized the peak computational rate of the machine, neglecting the more important sustained performance estimates. Sustained computational performance for a vector machine is considerably more difficult to determine since it will vary with the level of vectorization one can achieve.