The Cydra 5 computer system architecture

An overview of the Cydra 5 computer system architecture is presented. A single numeric processor and multiple interactive processors are used to provide sustained compute performance in numeric applications. The numeric processors´ unique directed dataflow architecture supports the parallelization of a much broader range of algorithms than vector processor architectures. Applications can be ported to the Cydra 5 and achieve very high performance with significantly less reprogramming than on alternative architectures. The numeric processor requires significantly less application reprogramming to make efficient use of its architecture to accelerate typical numeric applications. The numeric processor parallelizes programs with recurrences, conditionals within loops, unstructured memory reference, and other difficult-to-vectorize program constructs