Chandra S. Joshi

Architecture and implementation of a VLIW supercomputer

Very-long-instruction-word (VLIW) computers achieve high performance by exploiting the fine-grain parallelism present in sequential or vectorizable code. Multiflows /200 and /300 VLIW systems yielded near-supercomputer performance by this means despite the relatively slow (65 ns) clocks. With its much faster clock period (15 ns) and architectural improvements, the new /500 system attains approximately 4-9* the performance of its predecessors. The authors describe the /500 architecture and implementation (i.e. TRACE/500), with special attention paid to the tradeoffs involved in designing very-high-speed VLIWs.<<ETX>>