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The ILLIAC II was a revolutionary super-computer built by the University of Illinois that became operational in 1962.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(December 2010) |
The ILLIAC II was a revolutionary super-computer built by the University of Illinois that became operational in 1962.
The concept, proposed in 1958, pioneered Emitter-coupled logic (ECL) circuitry, pipelining, and transistor memory with a design goal of 100x speedup compared to ILLIAC I.
ILLIAC II had 8192 words of core memory, backed up by 65,536 words of storage on magnetic drums. The core memory access time was 1.8 to 2 µs. The magnetic drum access time was 8.5ms. [1] A "fast buffer" was also provided for storage of short loops and intermediate results (similar in concept to what is now called cache). The "fast buffer" access time was 0.25 µs.
The word size was 52 bits.
Floating point numbers used a format with seven bits of exponent (power of 4) and 45 bits of mantissa.
Instructions were either 26 bits or 13 bits long, allowing packing of up to four instructions per memory word.
Rather than naming the pipeline stages, "Fetch, Decode, and Execute" (as on Stretch), the pipelined stages were named, "Advanced Control, Delayed Control, and Interplay".
During check-out of the ILLIAC II, before it became fully operational, faculty member Donald B. Gillies programmed ILLIAC II to search for Mersenne prime numbers. The check-out period took roughly 3 weeks, during which the computer verified all the previous Mersenne primes and found three new prime numbers. The results were immortalized for more than a decade on a UIUC Postal Annex cancellation stamp, and were discussed in the New York Times , recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records , and described in a journal paper in Mathematics of Computation.
The ILLIAC II computer was disassembled roughly a decade after its construction. By this time the hundreds of modules were obsolete scrap; many faculty members took components home to keep. Donald B. Gillies kept 12 (mostly control) modules. His family donated 10 of these modules and the front panel to the University of Illinois CS department in 2006. The photos in this article were taken during the time of donation.
Donald W. Gillies, the son of Donald B. Gillies, has a complete set of documentation (instruction set, design reports, research reports, and grant progress reports, roughly 2000 pages) from the ILLIAC II project. He can be contacted for further details about this computer. [2] Most of this documentation should also be available as DCL technical reports in the UIUC Engineering library, although it would not be packaged as a single report.
A central processing unit (CPU)—also called a central processor or main processor—is the most important processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes instructions of a computer program, such as arithmetic, logic, controlling, and input/output (I/O) operations. This role contrasts with that of external components, such as main memory and I/O circuitry, and specialized coprocessors such as graphics processing units (GPUs).
Static random-access memory is a type of random-access memory (RAM) that uses latching circuitry (flip-flop) to store each bit. SRAM is volatile memory; data is lost when power is removed.
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The IBM 1620 was announced by IBM on October 21, 1959, and marketed as an inexpensive scientific computer. After a total production of about two thousand machines, it was withdrawn on November 19, 1970. Modified versions of the 1620 were used as the CPU of the IBM 1710 and IBM 1720 Industrial Process Control Systems.
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The Cyclone, was a vacuum tube computer, built by Iowa State College at Ames, Iowa. The computer was commissioned in July 1959. It was based on the IAS architecture developed by John von Neumann. The prototype was ILLIAC, the University of Illinois Automatic Computer. The Cyclone used 40-bit words, used two 20-bit instructions per word, and each instruction had an eight-bit op-code and a 12-bit operand or address field. In general IAS-based computers were not code compatible with each other, although originally math routines which ran on the ILLIAC would also run on the Cyclone.
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ILLIAC was a series of supercomputers built at a variety of locations, some at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In all, five computers were built in this series between 1951 and 1974. Some more modern projects also use the name.
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Donald Bruce Gillies was a Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who worked in the fields of computer design, game theory, and minicomputer programming environments.
IBM 7070 is a decimal-architecture intermediate data-processing system that was introduced by IBM in 1958. It was part of the IBM 700/7000 series, and was based on discrete transistors rather than the vacuum tubes of the 1950s. It was the company's first transistorized stored-program computer.
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