KFKI TPA XP-1



1992. The last machine marketed under the name "TPA": it's a parallel multiprocessor machine, with up to 16 processors in a crossbar backplane, where every processor has it's own direct path to the memory. It was designed to run applications like nuclear simulation, real-time modelling.

Implementation:

• 2-16 x MIPS R3000 RISC processor, with RA3010 floating-point coprocessor:

40 nsec cycle time, 128 kB cache, 64 MB local memory on the CPU board
• 64-1024 MB ECC memory
• 1-4 x VME bus for I/O (40 MB/s)
It was a nice machine, but the manufacturing wasn't easy, as the KFKI MSZKI didn't had the facilities to produce printed circuit boards with 12 layers (these boards were manufactured in Austria). Unfortunately there was no call for such a machine in Hungary, so only a prototype was built (shown above, in a Digital cabinet), although the designers continued to work on the project, and came up with the idea of the XP-2, where the processor nodes would have been connected via fibre-optics.

A processor card

The machine's peak performance was 20-230 MIPS (about 16-256 VUPs), floating-point peak was 10-160 MFLOPS. The operating system was a licensed AT&T SVR4 UNIX, modified for multiprocessing.

Ákos Varga

Back to the TPA pages
About the author