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The article on Cray Inc. states that "The Cray-1 was a major success when it was released, faster than all computers at the time except for the ILLIAC IV." But this article on ILLIAC IV states that "(ILLIAC IV) was finally ready for operation in 1976, after a decade of development that was now massively late, massively over budget, and outperformed by existing commercial machines like the Cray-1." These two articles seem to contradict each other. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.50.113.68 ( talk • contribs) 21:18, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
I never had a chance to use the ILLIAC IV, but I know many people who did and had an office in the building which housed it (at the moment I am across the street). So the issue boils down to what many people call an "apples-to-apples" comparison. If you are an armchair supercomputer watcher as most are, you only look at clock speed. If that were true then any latter (more recent) machine will generaly be faster. I never directly used a Cray-1 or a Cray-1S either, but I did use the X-MP/2 (upgraded to an X-MP/4) which succeeded the 1S which replaced the IV.
The ILLIAC had a slower individual processor element (PE) or control unit (CU) than the Cray-1. The serious computational philosophy question is whether one can add parallel work in sum. Software engineers like Fred Brooks say no. Managers of budgets today have to say yes (is 64 slower elements comparable to a machine 64 times faster than an individual element? No simple answer).
Additionally, speed ignores memory: both RAM and disk in this case. The ILLIAC had woefully little memory. It was only usable with the fixed head disks holding the main part of the problem and the processing unit memories acting as cache and the programmer acting as memory manager. Serious (real, not toy) supercomputing problems take up all memory (only toy problems sat in processor memory).
To this day the ILLIAC was faster in I/O, with at best a weak comparison to Connection Machine Data Vaults (non fixed head disks, much slower), than any other machine since. Apparently the much touted optical memory as tertiary store never worked. I have seen some of the optical strips (it was not disk).
--enm 1 jun 2006
"destined to be the last" really need to be edited out, as even the page for ILLIAC notes the ILLIAC 6.
--enm 1 jun 2006
This last comment is correct. When I recently discovered this page I found that it was almost entirely based on what can only be called rumor or a complete fiction, not even second hand information. Not only was the history wrong, but so was the computer science. As a member of the Illiac IV group at Illinois, worked on the machine in Paoli and was involved in the campus demonstrations (my office was fire-bombed, luckily it didn't go off), I have now updated it (and I conferred with other members of the project in doing it). More of course could be said, but what is there now is accurate. Jeanjour ( talk) 15:04, 21 December 2012 (UTC) John Day
I flagged the mention of a 1 Tbit optical storage device as "citation needed". That's roughly 3 orders of magnitude more storage than state of the art magnetic disk drives in 1976, i.e., it's hard to believe that the claimed capacity is anywhere near accurate. Paul Koning ( talk) 18:29, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
I have added a reference to the description of the "laser memory", the paper can be found at a New Zealand university website (unable to include the URL due to some blockage). Quoting the paper, it has the following description:
-- Nigwil ( talk) 09:29, 20 October 2013 (UTC)
This video The Illiac-IV lecture - Bay Area Computer History Perspectives Series provides a long list of the problems that the Illiac IV solved and how the results were still used beyond the life of the machine. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nigwil ( talk • contribs) 09:25, 20 October 2013 (UTC)
I changed "outside San Francisco" in the lead to "Moffett Airfield in Mountain View, California". Lots of things (luckily) are "outside San Francisco", including the Taj Mahal.
I added the detail of ILLIAC IV having been housed in B. N-233 at Ames and included a reference for this. I made a couple of stylistic changes.
I'm far from the most doctrinaire editor, but this page's references are shockingly few. It seems to have been written from editors' personal recollections. What a surprise! This is a problem with very many articles on the history of computing and computing machinery, where corroborating documents are often thin on the ground but where some grizzled principals intent on preserving history haven't yet snuffed it. I have no doubt that many of the article's assertions are correct but surely more of them can be connected with some reasonable reference than currently appear.
Many other puzzling and/or clumsy bits appear, e.g.,
and so on. Run-on sentences are one thing but "[highest] was 250 with peaks of 150"?
Maybe I'll rewrite for grammar and style, and just add a lot of "cites needed"? Rt3368 ( talk) 14:51, 25 September 2014 (UTC)
The wording at the beginning of the "Background" section:
is incorrect, cf. its link target, Orthogonality#Computer_science. Quite to the contrary, an "orthogonal" instruction set lacks redundancy, i.e. is as small as possible for the given purpose. Would some computer scientist (I am not) kindly improve the wording? Thanks, -- HReuter ( talk) 01:37, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
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Cheers. — cyberbot II Talk to my owner:Online 05:13, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
As mentioned in the ORDVAC article and quoted here by Charlie Jones (discussion platform entry by Charles Richmond) on the web some (all?) of these computers used a 5 level code for encoding hex digits to 0-9 and "KSNJFL" (for todays A-F) to a punch tape. (The letter sequence was described there using memory hooks like "king size numbers just for laughs" or "kind souls never josh fat ladies".)
Here is the 5-level code used by Illiac, transcribed from THE ILLIAC MINIATURE MANUAL, by John Halton, Digital Computer Laboratory File 260, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1958, page 3. I have preserved the layout as much as is possible using ASCII: THE TAPE CODE ------------- | Characters | n for 92 | Characters | n for 92 Tape Holes | F/S | L/S | Orders Tape Holes | F/S | L/S | Orders ---------------------------------- ---------------------------------- | o | 0 P 2F |O o | Delay Delay 3F | o O| 1 Q 66F |O o O| $(Tab) D 67F | o O | 2 W 130F |O o O | CR/LF CR/LF 131F | o OO| 3 E 194F |O o OO| ( B 195F | oO | 4 R 258F |O oO |L/S=Letter-Shift 259F | oO O| 5 T 322F |O oO O| , V 323F | oOO | 6 Y 386F |O oOO | ) A 387F | oOOO| 7 U 450F |O oOOO| / X 451F | Oo | 8 I 514F |OOo | Delay Delay 515F | Oo O| 9 O 578F |OOo O| = G 579F | Oo O | + K 642F |OOo O | . M 643F | Oo OO| - S 706F |OOo OO|F/S=Number-Shift 707F | OoO | N N 770F |OOoO | ' H 771F | OoO O| J J 834F |OOoO O| : C 835F | OoOO | F F 898F |OOoOO | x Z 899F | OoOOO| L L 962F |OOoOOO| Space Space 963F
To me those code looks like being then defined by some comfortable wiring method for the keyboard - but this is just a personal guess. Sorry, but i have no good clue right now what the last column is meant to mean - not even after having a quick look into THE ILLIAC MINIATURE MANUAL by John Halton from 1958 (8 pages). (I am storing the wholte table and header words here for a better long term reference.) -- Alexander.stohr ( talk) 16:39, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
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Reviewer: David Eppstein ( talk · contribs) 23:18, 27 January 2018 (UTC)
On the whole the prose is of good quality (criterion 1a), but it relies heavily on acronyms some of which are defined well after they are used (IAS, ILLIAC, ARPA) or are never defined (PC board). I think it would be better to avoid this style and spell out technical terms like "control unit" wherever they appear.
The lead section should consist of a summary of the material from other sections, and when doing so it does not need citations ( MOS:LEAD, criterion 1b). But instead the claims in the first paragraph (that it was one of the earliest massively parallel computers, that the original design had 256 FPUs and a single CPU, that it could process large array data, and that its instruction set made it SIMD) are unsourced, do not appear to be summaries of anything later in the article, and in some cases contradict the article (which says that there were 256 units that could be partitioned into multiple FPUs each, and that theere were four control units). Similarly, the claim in the second paragraph that Slotnick's original idea for this specific machine was in 1952 is not a summary and is unsourced. And the end of the second paragraph ("instead of 1024") contradicts the claim in the first paragraph that the original plan was for 256 processors. The claim in the third paragraph about a new facility is sourced, but not a summary. And again, many claims in the fourth paragraph are neither sourced nor summaries.
The references are consistently formatted (criterion 2a) and appear reliable (criterion 2b).
It would have been helpful to have a link for the Falk reference (the actual title appears to be "What went wrong V: Reaching for a gigaflop: The fate of the famed Illiac IV was shaped by both research brilliance and real-world disasters" and it can be found at https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.1976.6367550). The Slotnick's link is ok, but https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.1982.10003 is I think more permanent. And similarly the Barnes link is ok (and has the advantage of not needing subscription access) but the official link would be https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.1968.229158
Detailed checking found the following additional issues with sourcing (criteria 2c and 2d) beyond the unsourced claims in the intro:
At this point I got tired of finding problem after problem and stopped looking for more. Almost every single footnote and almost every single footnoted claim up to this point has something wrong with it. The article needs a thorough sentence-by-sentence check of whether what it says can be justified by what's in the sources. Only then will it be ready for GAN.
The article is on a specific topic so criterion 3a isn't really an issue, but there is a lot of component-by-component detail of machines that are not ILIAC IV; is this really necessary (criterion 3b)?
There are no issues with neutrality (criterion 4) or stability (criterion 5).
However, I think File:SISD, MIMD and SIMD computer processor designs.svg may be somewhat problematic (criterion 6). Essentially, it looks like a stealth way of introducing editorializations about the relative merits of different processing architectures into the article, without properly sourcing them. And at the size used for the article, it is completely illegible.
Conclusion: This is a long way from meeting criterion 2 (proper sourcing), and as such does not pass GA. Additionally I have significant concerns about criteria 1b (lead does not summarize article) and 3b (overly detailed about tangential topics). But in other respects the article looks pretty good, so once these issues are handled the article may be ready for another attempt at GA. — David Eppstein ( talk) 01:13, 28 January 2018 (UTC)
Everybody knows that the Illiac IV was implemented by Burroughs, and even in the late 1970s Burroughs used that fact in their public relations. I've just added a bit to the talk page of the ARPANET article quoting somebody's recollection of the plant etc. where this was done, since it looks as though it had one of the original ARPANET IMPS, back when there were only about a dozen nodes on the network. MarkMLl ( talk) 07:29, 18 October 2019 (UTC)
Just come across http://www.silogic.com/PEPE/PEPE.html which was another Burroughs super, and- curiously- one that I never heard discussed when I worked for them. MarkMLl ( talk) 17:33, 10 November 2022 (UTC)
ILLIAC IV was nominated as a Engineering and technology good article, but it did not meet the good article criteria at the time (January 28, 2018). There are suggestions on the review page for improving the article. If you can improve it, please do; it may then be renominated. |
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||
|
The article on Cray Inc. states that "The Cray-1 was a major success when it was released, faster than all computers at the time except for the ILLIAC IV." But this article on ILLIAC IV states that "(ILLIAC IV) was finally ready for operation in 1976, after a decade of development that was now massively late, massively over budget, and outperformed by existing commercial machines like the Cray-1." These two articles seem to contradict each other. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.50.113.68 ( talk • contribs) 21:18, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
I never had a chance to use the ILLIAC IV, but I know many people who did and had an office in the building which housed it (at the moment I am across the street). So the issue boils down to what many people call an "apples-to-apples" comparison. If you are an armchair supercomputer watcher as most are, you only look at clock speed. If that were true then any latter (more recent) machine will generaly be faster. I never directly used a Cray-1 or a Cray-1S either, but I did use the X-MP/2 (upgraded to an X-MP/4) which succeeded the 1S which replaced the IV.
The ILLIAC had a slower individual processor element (PE) or control unit (CU) than the Cray-1. The serious computational philosophy question is whether one can add parallel work in sum. Software engineers like Fred Brooks say no. Managers of budgets today have to say yes (is 64 slower elements comparable to a machine 64 times faster than an individual element? No simple answer).
Additionally, speed ignores memory: both RAM and disk in this case. The ILLIAC had woefully little memory. It was only usable with the fixed head disks holding the main part of the problem and the processing unit memories acting as cache and the programmer acting as memory manager. Serious (real, not toy) supercomputing problems take up all memory (only toy problems sat in processor memory).
To this day the ILLIAC was faster in I/O, with at best a weak comparison to Connection Machine Data Vaults (non fixed head disks, much slower), than any other machine since. Apparently the much touted optical memory as tertiary store never worked. I have seen some of the optical strips (it was not disk).
--enm 1 jun 2006
"destined to be the last" really need to be edited out, as even the page for ILLIAC notes the ILLIAC 6.
--enm 1 jun 2006
This last comment is correct. When I recently discovered this page I found that it was almost entirely based on what can only be called rumor or a complete fiction, not even second hand information. Not only was the history wrong, but so was the computer science. As a member of the Illiac IV group at Illinois, worked on the machine in Paoli and was involved in the campus demonstrations (my office was fire-bombed, luckily it didn't go off), I have now updated it (and I conferred with other members of the project in doing it). More of course could be said, but what is there now is accurate. Jeanjour ( talk) 15:04, 21 December 2012 (UTC) John Day
I flagged the mention of a 1 Tbit optical storage device as "citation needed". That's roughly 3 orders of magnitude more storage than state of the art magnetic disk drives in 1976, i.e., it's hard to believe that the claimed capacity is anywhere near accurate. Paul Koning ( talk) 18:29, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
I have added a reference to the description of the "laser memory", the paper can be found at a New Zealand university website (unable to include the URL due to some blockage). Quoting the paper, it has the following description:
-- Nigwil ( talk) 09:29, 20 October 2013 (UTC)
This video The Illiac-IV lecture - Bay Area Computer History Perspectives Series provides a long list of the problems that the Illiac IV solved and how the results were still used beyond the life of the machine. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nigwil ( talk • contribs) 09:25, 20 October 2013 (UTC)
I changed "outside San Francisco" in the lead to "Moffett Airfield in Mountain View, California". Lots of things (luckily) are "outside San Francisco", including the Taj Mahal.
I added the detail of ILLIAC IV having been housed in B. N-233 at Ames and included a reference for this. I made a couple of stylistic changes.
I'm far from the most doctrinaire editor, but this page's references are shockingly few. It seems to have been written from editors' personal recollections. What a surprise! This is a problem with very many articles on the history of computing and computing machinery, where corroborating documents are often thin on the ground but where some grizzled principals intent on preserving history haven't yet snuffed it. I have no doubt that many of the article's assertions are correct but surely more of them can be connected with some reasonable reference than currently appear.
Many other puzzling and/or clumsy bits appear, e.g.,
and so on. Run-on sentences are one thing but "[highest] was 250 with peaks of 150"?
Maybe I'll rewrite for grammar and style, and just add a lot of "cites needed"? Rt3368 ( talk) 14:51, 25 September 2014 (UTC)
The wording at the beginning of the "Background" section:
is incorrect, cf. its link target, Orthogonality#Computer_science. Quite to the contrary, an "orthogonal" instruction set lacks redundancy, i.e. is as small as possible for the given purpose. Would some computer scientist (I am not) kindly improve the wording? Thanks, -- HReuter ( talk) 01:37, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
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Cheers. — cyberbot II Talk to my owner:Online 05:13, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
As mentioned in the ORDVAC article and quoted here by Charlie Jones (discussion platform entry by Charles Richmond) on the web some (all?) of these computers used a 5 level code for encoding hex digits to 0-9 and "KSNJFL" (for todays A-F) to a punch tape. (The letter sequence was described there using memory hooks like "king size numbers just for laughs" or "kind souls never josh fat ladies".)
Here is the 5-level code used by Illiac, transcribed from THE ILLIAC MINIATURE MANUAL, by John Halton, Digital Computer Laboratory File 260, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1958, page 3. I have preserved the layout as much as is possible using ASCII: THE TAPE CODE ------------- | Characters | n for 92 | Characters | n for 92 Tape Holes | F/S | L/S | Orders Tape Holes | F/S | L/S | Orders ---------------------------------- ---------------------------------- | o | 0 P 2F |O o | Delay Delay 3F | o O| 1 Q 66F |O o O| $(Tab) D 67F | o O | 2 W 130F |O o O | CR/LF CR/LF 131F | o OO| 3 E 194F |O o OO| ( B 195F | oO | 4 R 258F |O oO |L/S=Letter-Shift 259F | oO O| 5 T 322F |O oO O| , V 323F | oOO | 6 Y 386F |O oOO | ) A 387F | oOOO| 7 U 450F |O oOOO| / X 451F | Oo | 8 I 514F |OOo | Delay Delay 515F | Oo O| 9 O 578F |OOo O| = G 579F | Oo O | + K 642F |OOo O | . M 643F | Oo OO| - S 706F |OOo OO|F/S=Number-Shift 707F | OoO | N N 770F |OOoO | ' H 771F | OoO O| J J 834F |OOoO O| : C 835F | OoOO | F F 898F |OOoOO | x Z 899F | OoOOO| L L 962F |OOoOOO| Space Space 963F
To me those code looks like being then defined by some comfortable wiring method for the keyboard - but this is just a personal guess. Sorry, but i have no good clue right now what the last column is meant to mean - not even after having a quick look into THE ILLIAC MINIATURE MANUAL by John Halton from 1958 (8 pages). (I am storing the wholte table and header words here for a better long term reference.) -- Alexander.stohr ( talk) 16:39, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
GA toolbox |
---|
Reviewing |
Reviewer: David Eppstein ( talk · contribs) 23:18, 27 January 2018 (UTC)
On the whole the prose is of good quality (criterion 1a), but it relies heavily on acronyms some of which are defined well after they are used (IAS, ILLIAC, ARPA) or are never defined (PC board). I think it would be better to avoid this style and spell out technical terms like "control unit" wherever they appear.
The lead section should consist of a summary of the material from other sections, and when doing so it does not need citations ( MOS:LEAD, criterion 1b). But instead the claims in the first paragraph (that it was one of the earliest massively parallel computers, that the original design had 256 FPUs and a single CPU, that it could process large array data, and that its instruction set made it SIMD) are unsourced, do not appear to be summaries of anything later in the article, and in some cases contradict the article (which says that there were 256 units that could be partitioned into multiple FPUs each, and that theere were four control units). Similarly, the claim in the second paragraph that Slotnick's original idea for this specific machine was in 1952 is not a summary and is unsourced. And the end of the second paragraph ("instead of 1024") contradicts the claim in the first paragraph that the original plan was for 256 processors. The claim in the third paragraph about a new facility is sourced, but not a summary. And again, many claims in the fourth paragraph are neither sourced nor summaries.
The references are consistently formatted (criterion 2a) and appear reliable (criterion 2b).
It would have been helpful to have a link for the Falk reference (the actual title appears to be "What went wrong V: Reaching for a gigaflop: The fate of the famed Illiac IV was shaped by both research brilliance and real-world disasters" and it can be found at https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.1976.6367550). The Slotnick's link is ok, but https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.1982.10003 is I think more permanent. And similarly the Barnes link is ok (and has the advantage of not needing subscription access) but the official link would be https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.1968.229158
Detailed checking found the following additional issues with sourcing (criteria 2c and 2d) beyond the unsourced claims in the intro:
At this point I got tired of finding problem after problem and stopped looking for more. Almost every single footnote and almost every single footnoted claim up to this point has something wrong with it. The article needs a thorough sentence-by-sentence check of whether what it says can be justified by what's in the sources. Only then will it be ready for GAN.
The article is on a specific topic so criterion 3a isn't really an issue, but there is a lot of component-by-component detail of machines that are not ILIAC IV; is this really necessary (criterion 3b)?
There are no issues with neutrality (criterion 4) or stability (criterion 5).
However, I think File:SISD, MIMD and SIMD computer processor designs.svg may be somewhat problematic (criterion 6). Essentially, it looks like a stealth way of introducing editorializations about the relative merits of different processing architectures into the article, without properly sourcing them. And at the size used for the article, it is completely illegible.
Conclusion: This is a long way from meeting criterion 2 (proper sourcing), and as such does not pass GA. Additionally I have significant concerns about criteria 1b (lead does not summarize article) and 3b (overly detailed about tangential topics). But in other respects the article looks pretty good, so once these issues are handled the article may be ready for another attempt at GA. — David Eppstein ( talk) 01:13, 28 January 2018 (UTC)
Everybody knows that the Illiac IV was implemented by Burroughs, and even in the late 1970s Burroughs used that fact in their public relations. I've just added a bit to the talk page of the ARPANET article quoting somebody's recollection of the plant etc. where this was done, since it looks as though it had one of the original ARPANET IMPS, back when there were only about a dozen nodes on the network. MarkMLl ( talk) 07:29, 18 October 2019 (UTC)
Just come across http://www.silogic.com/PEPE/PEPE.html which was another Burroughs super, and- curiously- one that I never heard discussed when I worked for them. MarkMLl ( talk) 17:33, 10 November 2022 (UTC)