Sanyo Electric Co Ltd has a highly parallel desktop computer, Cyberflow/64, in the pipeline, which it intends to target at users of three dimensional image processing and visualisation applications. According to International Data Group, Cyberflow/64 must be used with a separate front-end machine, such as a Unix workstation or personal computer, and as a result, has SBus, fast SBus, VME bus, SCSI and fast SCSI interfaces. It also incorporates 64 processor elements or nodes. Each has 4Mb of local memory and a self-routing mechanism built in, which enable inter-processor data transfer rates of up to 256 Gbps. Future models will incorporate up to 1,024 processors, and should theoretically provide speeds of up to 1,024 Gbps. Each processing element sits on a credit card-sized circuit board and comprises a chip designed by Sanyo that incorporates a floating-point unit, vector operation unit and communications unit. Every processing element also communicates separately with the others to ensure it finds the best possible means of connection. Some 16 of these processing elements are integrated onto a single processor board, of which there are four in the machine. Sanyo has also developed various programming tools, such as a parallel compiler, linker, assembler, debugger and software simulator as well as mathematics, graphics, image processing and data communication libraries. Programming is carried out in C or assembler. The Cyberflow/64 is targeted at such markets as computer-aided design, virtual reality, scientific simulation and animation. No prices and release dates have been decided.
