Illiac IV (Burroughs and University of Illinois) (1965)

The University of Illinois and Burroughs Computer Company teamed up to build the Illiac IV.

Illiac IV became operational at the Institute for Advanced Computation in Moffett, Califonia. It achieved a speed of 200 million instructions per second and had a gigabit I/O transfer rate via a unique combination of parallel architecture and "pipe-lining" sixty-four element processors.

Illiac IV's Array Processor was perfect for applications which involved matrices and partial differential equations like those found in weather prediction software or functions to find multiple values around a point. Illiac IV remained competitive, from a speed point of view until the mid-1980's.

The computer was originally designed to have 64 processors, but was built with only 16 due to the $31,000,000 cost by the end of the sixties.

Photo Courtesy of Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

History of Computing

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