Background

Abstract

The Illiac IV story begins in the mid-1960’s. Then, as now, the computational community had requirements for machines much faster and with more capacity than were available. Large classes of important calculational problems were outside the realm of practicality because the most powerful machines of the day were too slow by orders of magnitude to execute the programs in plausible time. These applications included ballistic missile defense analyses, reactor design calculations, climate modelling, large linear programming, hydrodynamic simulations, seismic data processing, and a host of others.