ILLIAC II
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The ILLIAC II was a revolutionary super-computer built by the
Description
The concept, proposed in 1958, pioneered Emitter-coupled logic (ECL) circuitry, pipelining, and transistor memory with a design goal of 100x speedup compared to ILLIAC I.
ILLIAC II had 8192 words of
The word size was 52 bits.
Rather than naming the pipeline stages, "Fetch, Decode, and Execute" (as on Stretch), the pipelined stages were named, "Advanced Control, Delayed Control, and Interplay".
Innovation
- The ILLIAC II was one of the first Stretchcomputer, ILLIAC II was designed using "future transistors" that had not yet been invented.
- The ILLIAC II project was proposed before, and competed with IBM's Stretch project, and several ILLIAC designers felt that Stretch borrowed many of its ideas from ILLIAC II, whose design and documentation were published openly as University of Illinois Tech Reports. Members of the ILLIAC II team jokingly referred to the competing IBM Project as "St. Retch".
- The ILLIAC II had a division unit designed by faculty member SRT Division algorithm.
- The ILLIAC II was one of the first pipelined computers, along with IBM's Stretch Computer. The pipelined control was designed by faculty member Donald B. Gillies. The pipeline stages were named Advanced Control, Delayed Control, and Interplay.
- The ILLIAC II was the first computer to incorporate Speed-Independent Circuitry, invented by faculty member David E. Muller. Speed-Independent Circuitry is a class of asynchronous digital logic based on the Muller C-element. This digital logic, being asynchronous, runs at full speed of transistor propagation and requires no clocks.
Discoveries
During check-out of the ILLIAC II, before it became fully operational, faculty member
End of life
The ILLIAC II computer was disassembled roughly a decade after its construction. By this time the hundreds of modules were obsolete scrap; many faculty members took components home to keep. Donald B. Gillies kept 12 (mostly control) modules. His family donated 10 of these modules and the front panel to the University of Illinois CS department in 2006. The photos in this article were taken during the time of donation.
Donald W. Gillies, the son of Donald B. Gillies, has a complete set of documentation (instruction set, design reports, research reports, and grant progress reports, roughly 2000 pages) from the ILLIAC II project. He can be contacted for further details about this computer.[2] Most of this documentation should also be available as DCL technical reports in the UIUC Engineering library, although it would not be packaged as a single report.
See also
References
External links
- Gillies, Donald B. Three New Mersenne Primes and a Statistical Theory, Mathematics of Comput., Vol. 18:85 (Jan. 1964), pp. 93–97.
- ILLIAC II documentation at bitsavers.org