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.








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.