The Graphics Supercomputer: A New Class of Computer.
Gordon Bell, William S. Worley · 1989
In 1988 a new class of computer, the graphics supercom-puter, was introduced by two start-up companies. As a member of both the supercomputer and workstation fami-lies, the graphics supercomputer enables both high-per-formance computation and high-speed, threedimensional, interactive visualization to be performed on a single, inte-grated system. In Ardent's TITAN system, high floating point operation rates are provided by combining the fastest RISC microprocessors with traditional supercomputer components such as multiple, pipelined vector processors and interleaved memory systems. This has resulted in much more cost-effective computation and a clear diseconomy of scale over supercomputers and minisupercomputers. For users ofworkstations that lack the benefits of supercomputer components, the graphics supercomputer can be used sim-