Fujitsu VP

The Fujitsu FACOM VP was a series of vector supercomputers designed, built and sold by Fujitsu. Announced in July 1982, it was the first of the three initial Japanese commercial supercomputers, followed a month later by the Hitachi HITAC S-810 and in 1983 by the NEC SX-2. Its roots lay in the F230-75, a prototype vector co-processor attached to Fujitsu mainframes at the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission and the National Aerospace Laboratory in 1977; the VP combined such a vector unit with a scalar processor in a single machine. The first models were the VP-100 and VP-200, which differed mainly in clock rate, and lower-end versions followed as the VP-30 and VP-50. A two-pipeline VP-400 arrived in 1986, and a later E series added a multiply-and-add unit. A single load-store unit limited memory bandwidth to about 4.57 GB/s on the top model. Developed with funding from Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, it was sold mainly in Japan, with Amdahl marketing it in the United States and Siemens in Europe, until the VP2000 family replaced it in 1990.