The Cydra 5 Departmental Supercomputer: design philosophies, decisions and trade-offs

Abstract

The Cydra 5 Departmental Supercomputer is a comparatively moderately priced supercomputer intended for use by small work groups or departments of scientists and engineers. It is priced at about the same level as a high-end superminicomputer but is able to achieve about one-fourth to two-thirds the performance of a supercomputer. The discussion covers the Cydra 5 system architecture, the directed data-flow architecture on which it is based, the selection of the numeric processor, and the main memory system.<>