Early High Performance Machines
High Performance computing has always implied the use of pipelining
- IBM Stretch, S/360 Model 91, Cray 1, Cyber 205
Pipelining breaks operations into small steps performed in “assembly line” fashion
- The size t of the longest step determines rate
- Operations are started every t time units
The most common application of pipelining became “vector instructions” in which operations could be applied to all elements of a vector
Pipelining is used extensively in processor design and parallelism is a more effective way to achieve high perf