Due Tuesday, October 9.

Read the following paper:

  1. The CRAY-1 Computer System - R.M. Russel, Communications of the ACM, January 1978

Comment on the paper. Provide a short (a few sentences) summary of the focus of the paper or key arguments made. Make sure to specifically address these points:

  1. The speed of vector computers, as compared to scalar computers
  2. Minimum size vector required to improve over a scalar loop
  3. Relative speed to other computers
  4. Interesting architectural features (clock rate, size of register state, number of function units, etc) as compared to today's CPUs

Your comments do not need to be long at all; I mostly want to make sure that you've thought about the important parts of each paper.