Numerical Wind Tunnel

Numerical Wind Tunnel was an early implementation of the vector parallel architecture developed in a joint project between National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan and Fujitsu. It was the first supercomputer with a sustained performance of close to 100 Gflop/s for a wide range of fluid dynamics application programs. It stood out at the top of the TOP500 during 1993-1996.

It consisted of parallel connected 166 vector processors with a gate delay as low as 60 ps in the Ga-As chips. The resulting cycle time was 9.5 ns. The processor had four independent pipelines each capable of executing two Multiply-Add instructions in parallel resulting in a peak speed of 1.7 Gflop/s per processor. Each processor board was equipped with 256 Megabytes of central memory.^[1][2]

References

1. ^ TOP500 Annual Report 1994.
2. ^ N. Hirose and M. Fukuda (1997). "Numerical Wind Tunnel (NWT) and CFD Research at National Aerospace Laboratory". Proceedings of HPC-Asia '97. IEEE Computer Society. doi:10.1109/HPC.1997.592130.