VPP300 Hardware Configuration

The ANU has a thirteen processor Fujitsu VPP300 with a peak speed of about 29 Gflops with 14 Gbytes of memory. Technical features include:

• 0.35 µm, 3.3V CMOS technology
• uniform 7ns clock rate (except memory which is 10ns)

Each processing element (PE) consists of:

• a scalar unit (SU):
  • an LIW (long-instruction-word) RISC CPU
  • approximately 100Mflops peak
  • simultaneous scalar, VU and DTU instructions

  a vector unit (VU):

  • 1 load, 1 store, 1 add, 1 multiply, 1 divide pipe each completing 8 operations per cycle (except divide which does 8 operations per 7 cycles)
  • chained load-mult-add allowing a peak of 2.2 Gflops
    (matrix multiply achieves 2.18Gflops)
  • 128kB of vector registers
    configurable in "power-of-two" steps between 256 registers of length 64 words to 8 registers of length 2048 words.

  memory (MSU):

  • 512MB of SDRAM memory on 8PEs and 2GB on the other 5PEs.
  • 4 and 16 Mbit chips on the small and large memory PEs, respectively.
  • 64 banks

  and a data transfer unit (DTU):

  • for direct memory access data communication to the interprocessor network.

The network is a full crossbar (all processors "equidistant" from one another) with a peak bandwidth of 570MB/s bi-directional and an achievable latency of about 5 µsecs.

The system has 48 GBs of RAID disk array to be used mainly for scratch and production work.

The machines hostname is vpp.anu.edu.au. A SUN 167MHz UltraSPARC with hostname covpp.anu.edu.au is available as a file server and development platform.

The VPP is connected to the ANU Internet backbone's A100 ATM Switch using a 100Mb/s FDDI interface, allowing fast data transfer rates. An ATM switch (150Mb/s) is also used to connect to the Mass Data Storage System, covpp, and the Visualization lab, enabling overall gigabit speed data transfer capability.