ILLIAC II-A Short Description and Annotated Bibliography

ILLIAC II is a general purpose computer built at the University of Illinois, Urbana. It contains about 55000 transistors and has a floating multiply time of 6.3 μs. A number of features are provided to increase the speed of operation. There are three controls in largely concurrent operation. The control circuits are largely asynchronous and speed independent. The floating point arithmetic unit contains two adders and utilizes redundant number representation and separate carry storage. The memory hierarchy has members ranging from the 10-word, 0.2-μs. flow gating memory to magnetic tapes. Order fetches from the main 1.8-μs. core memory are minimized by packing two to four orders per word, and by holding two words of orders in the flow gating memory for execution of short loops. The bibliography lists 40 papers related to the design of this computer.