ILLIAC IV
The ILLIAC IV was one of the most infamous supercomputers ever. It used early ideas on SIMD (single instruction stream, multiple data streams). The project started in 1965, with a design goal of 256 processors and a 13MHz clock. In 1976 it ran its first successful application. It had 1MB memory (64x16KB).Although designed by University of Illinois, during the 1960s anti-war protests it was decided to move it to a government facility where it could be protected. Moffett Field, California was selected.
Its actual performance of 15 MFLOPS compared unfavourably to its estimated performance of 1000 MFLOPS. It totally failed as a computer, only a quarter of the fully planned machine (64 processors) was ever built, costs escalated from the $8 million estimated in 1966 to $31 million by 1972, and the computer took three more years of engineering before it was operational.
Attempts to understand the reasons for the failure of the ILLIAC IV architecture pushed forward research in parallel computing, leading the way for successful massively-parallel machines such as the Thinking Machines CM-1 and CM-2.
This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing and is used with permission under the GFDL.