THE TERAFLOP SUPERCOMPUTER APEMILLE - ARCHITECTURE, SOFTWARE AND PROJECT STATUS-REPORT

APEmille is a SPMD parallel processor under development at INFN, Italy , in cooperation with DESY, Germany. APEmille is suited for grand chal lenges computational problems such as QCD simulations, climate modelli ng, 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 p rocessor is optimized for complex computations and has a peak performa nce of 528 Mflop at 66 MHz. Each processing element has 8 Mbytes of lo cally addressable RAM. On the software side particular emphasis is dev oted to the programming languages that will be available (TAO and C++) and their object oriented, dynamic characteristics: with TAO it is po ssible to develop language extensions similar to the usual HEP notatio n; with C++ the portability from and towards different platforms is ma de possible. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.