Unique design concepts in GF11 and their impact on performance
Manoj Kumar · IBM Journal of Research and Development · 1992
GF11 is a 512-way SIMD parallel computer currently used to verify quantum chromodynamics theory and to explore the SIMD approach to parallel processing. System design choices, such as network design, processing element design, and other architectural features, allow GF11 to sustain very high performance, close to the 10-gigaFLOPS peak. Several applications, such as structural analysis, seismic modeling, computational fluid dynamics, and linear algebra, have been ported to GF11. Applications execute in the range of 4 to 10 gigaFLOPS. The diversity in applications that perform well on GF11 demonstrates that the SIMD architecture is effective for a much larger set of applications than previously believed. The high network and data-memory bandwidths minimize the effort required to tune applications for optimum performance.