The teraflop supercomputer APEmille: architecture, software and project status report Original Research Article

APEmille is a SPMD parallel processor under development at INFN, Italy, in cooperation with DESY, Germany. APEmille is suited for grand challenges computational problems such as QCD simulations, climate modelling, neural networks, computational chemistry, numerical wind tunnels, seismic and combustion simulations. Its 1 Teraflop/s peak performance and its architecture, together with its language features, allow such applications to execute effectively. APEmille is based on an array of custom arithmetic processors arranged on a tridimensional torus. The processor is optimized for complex computations and has a peak performance of 528 Mflop at 66 MHz. Each processing element has 8 Mbytes of locally addressable RAM. On the software side particular emphasis is devoted to the programming languages that will be available (TAO and C++) and their object oriented, dynamic characteristics: with TAO it is possible to develop language extensions similar to the usual HEP notation; with C++ the portability from and towards different platforms is made possible.