IBM has used the RISC microprocessor at the heart of the RT Personal Computer as the building block node processor for an experimental massively parallel computer, IBM’s research direc tor John Armstrong revealed at a briefing held in Brussels yesterday. Called the RD3, the machine, running at the Thomas J Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York presently consists of 64 nodes, and is rated at 1.3 Giga instructions per second or GIPS. It has been built for research into general purpose rather than specifically scientific parallel processing, and has been designed to be expanded to 512 nodes, each of them an RT family RISC CPU.
