Goodyear MPP
Overview
 
The Goodyear Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) was a
massively parallel processing supercomputer
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...

 built by Goodyear Aerospace
Goodyear Aerospace
Goodyear Aerospace Corporation was the aerospace and defense subsidiary of Goodyear.-Early Years:The company began as Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.’s Aeronautics Department and renamed in 1917 as the Goodyear Zeppelin Corporation set up to construct dirigibles for the US military...


for the NASA
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...

 Goddard Space Flight Center
Goddard Space Flight Center
The Goddard Space Flight Center is a major NASA space research laboratory established on May 1, 1959 as NASA's first space flight center. GSFC employs approximately 10,000 civil servants and contractors, and is located approximately northeast of Washington, D.C. in Greenbelt, Maryland, USA. GSFC,...

.
It was designed to deliver enormous computational power at lower cost than
other existing supercomputer architectures, by using thousands of
simple processing elements, rather than one or a few highly complex CPUs.
Development of the MPP began circa 1979; it was delivered in May 1983,
and was in general use from 1985 until 1991.

It was based on Goodyear's earlier STARAN
STARAN
STARAN might be the first commercially available computer designed around an associative memory. The STARAN computer was designed and built by Goodyear Aerospace Corporation. It is a Content Addressable Parallel Processor, a type of parallel processor which uses content addressable memory...

 array processor, a 4x256 1-bit processing element (PE) computer.
The MPP was a 128x128 2-dimensional array of 1-bit wide PEs.
 
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