That appears to be an earlier model of a similar system we had at UBC
which could crunch arrays of FP numbers at 10 Mflops. Had it
connected to an 11/44 and just recall doing some frantic programming
mainly involving using minimal code as had to use memory management
to allocate memory pages to get data into array processor and then
fetch results. Realized at that time that a 56 Kb memory space was a
bit limited for this type of work. Did FFT far faster than 11/23
(which took 1 second for 1024 points using DEC's code that shipped
with MINC) but still had to do overnight runs to analyze a lot of our
data. Likely have bad memories of that part of my programming career
as we were under some rather tight deadlines to analyze data to get a
few papers published and I much preferred writing in PDP11 assembler
as very rarely had to deal with running out of memory issues with
data acquisition code.
Out of curiousity, decided to benchmark one of my old, really cheap
PC laptops that got in 2010 and it managed 30 Mflops using double
precision arithmetic. 10 Mflop performance no longer as impressive
as it used to be.
I picked this up a number of years ago for reasons that entirely escape
me. It's certainly neat, but I don't see myself ever actually using it and
it's large and heavy.
Documented here:
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/fps/7259-02_AP-120B_procHbk.pdf
Mine appears to have a DEC-style interface but I'm unsure what it talks to
on the DEC side of things.
I can take pictures if there's interest, but it's fairly nondescript, just
a large white box with rack-mount ears and a small panel with some switches
on it.
It's in the Seattle area if anyone wants it, and it's free! Shipping is...
not something I really want to think about right now.
- Josh
