Goodyear MPP

The Goodyear Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) was a massively parallel processing supercomputer built by Goodyear Aerospace for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. 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 array processor, a 4x256 1-bit processing element (PE) computer. The MPP was a 128x128 2-dimensional array of 1-bit wide PEs. In actuality 132x128 PEs were configured with a 4x128 configuration added for fault tolerance to substitute for up to 4 rows (or columns) of processors in the presence of problems. The PEs operated in an SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) fashion - each processor performed the same operations simultaneously, on different data elements, under the control of a microprogrammed control unit.

After the MPP was retired in 1991, it was donated to the Smithsonian Institution, and is now in the collection of the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. It was succeeded at Goddard by MasPar MP-1 and Cray T3D massively parallel computers.

The MPP was initially developed for high-speed analysis of satellite images. In early tests, it was able to extract and separate different land-use areas on Landsat imagery in 18 seconds, as compared with 7 hours on a DEC VAX 11/780.

Once the system was put into production use, NASA's Office of Space Science and Applications solicited proposals from scientists across the country to test and implement a wide range of computational algorithms on the MPP. 40 projects were accepted, to form the "MPP Working Group"; results of most of them were presented at the First Symposium on the Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation, in 1986.

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