Fujitsu VP

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The VP machines were Fujitsu's first commercial series of vector processing supercomputers, first released in 1983 and selling until replaced by the Fujitsu VP2000 family in 1990. Developed with government funding and released along with the NEC SX-2 and Hitachi S-820, the VP was part of an effort designed to wrest control of the supercomputer market from the collection of small US-based companies like Cray Research and Convex Computer. The ending of the cold war during this period made the market for supercomputers dry up almost overnight, and the Japanese firms decided that their mass-production capabilities were better spent elsewhere.

Fujitsu had built a prototype vector co-processor known as the F230-75, which was installed attached to their own mainframe machines in the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission and National Aerospace Lab in 1977. The processor was similar in most ways to the famed Cray-1, but did not support Cray's "vector chaining" capabilities and was therefore somewhat slower. Nevertheless the machines were rather inexpensive, and during the late 1970s supercomputers were seen as a source of national pride, and an effort started to commercialize the design by combining it with a scalar processor to create an all-in-one design.

The result was released in 1983 as the VP-100 and VP-200, differing primarily in clock speed. Lower-end units were spun off as the VP-30 and VP-50. In 1986 a two-pipeline version was released as the VP-400. The next year the entire series was updated with the addition of a new vector unit that supported a multiply-and-add unit that could retire two results per clock cycle. This resulted in the "E series", VP-30E through VP-400E.

One problem with the design was the limited memory bandwidth as a result of having only one load-store unit. Even on the top-end VP-400E it could drive only 4.57 GB/s peak, limiting the maximum performance to only 0.5GFLOPS for 64-bit doubles. US designs focused on this problem in the early 1980s, and the contemporary Cray-2 could drive about 2 GB/s per processor, with up to four processors.

The VP series sold primarily in Japan, with about 80 units shipped before turning to the VP2000 series.