A performance comparison of the IBM RS/6000 and the Astronautics ZS-1

Journal Article · Tue Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 1991 · Computer; (United States)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/2.67192· OSTI ID:5918405

Smith, W M; Abraham, S G; Davidson, E S ^[1]

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1. Univ. of Michigan, MI (US)

Concurrent uniprocessor architectures, of which vector and superscalar are two examples, are designed to capitalize on fine-grain parallelism. The authors have developed a performance evaluation method for comparing and improving these architectures, and in this article they present the methodology and a detailed case study of two machines. The runtime of many programs is dominated by time spent in loop constructs - for example, Fortran Do-loops. Loops generally comprise two logical processes: The access process generates addresses for memory operations while the execute process operates on floating-point data. Memory access patterns typically can be generated independently of the data in the execute process. This independence allows the access process to slip ahead, thereby hiding memory latency. The IBM 360/91 was designed in 1967 to achieve slip dynamically, at runtime. One CPU unit executes integer operations while another handles floating-point operations. Other machines, including the VAX 9000 and the IBM RS/6000, use a similar approach.

• OSTI ID: 5918405
• Journal Information: Computer; (United States), Journal Name: Computer; (United States) Vol. 24:1; ISSN 0018-9162; ISSN CPTRB
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990200* -- Mathematics & Computers
COMPARATIVE EVALUATIONS
COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
COMPUTER CODES
COMPUTERS
DIGITAL COMPUTERS
EVALUATION
FORTRAN
IBM COMPUTERS
MEMORY MANAGEMENT
PARALLEL PROCESSING
PERFORMANCE TESTING
PROGRAMMING
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
SUPERCOMPUTERS
TESTING
VECTOR PROCESSING