CEDAR aka ILLIAC V

As early as 1977, there was collaboration for a “picosecond” computer. Described in early proposal drafts by W. J. “Ted” Poppelbaum as a way to minimize the “cost of interconnections”, ILLIAC V/CEDAR was seen as a way to “take maximum advantage of the low cost and high reliability obtainable from LSI”.  A memo from W.J Kubitz, of ILLIAC II fame, to Poppelbaum, discusses the potential of a “machine [that] wouldn’t be a run-of-the mill number cruncher but rather a machine oriented toward information retrieval, wideband 1/0 and communications processing”

Eight years later, Professor David Kuck led construction on a hierarchical shared-memory supercomputer. This SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) system embodied advances in interconnection networks, control unit support of parallelism, optimizing compilers and parallel algorithms and applications.

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Board of Trustees, University of Illinois. (2012). CS@Illinois Hitsory: 1985. Retrieved from http://cs.illinois.edu/csillinois/history.

Kubitz, W.J. (1977). “The Technology for ILLIAC 5”. Proposal Draft. Found in University of Illinois Archives. Series: 11/15/21, Box No. 6

Kubitz, W.J. (December 1st, 1977). “ILLIAC 5”. Memo from Kubitz to Poppelbaum. Found in University of Illinois Archives: Series 11/15/21, Box No. 6.