Talk:Heterogeneous Element Processor

1982 date verification and source: "...January 1968, he founded Denelcor, Inc. In 1973, at the request of NASA, Denelcor began development of a parallel processor supercomputer which became the company's principle product. The HEP (Heterogeneous Element Processor) was the first commercially available multi-instruction, multi-data stream (MIMD) parallel processor system.

Denelcor installed its computer systems for the National Security Agency, the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, the Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, and Messerschmitt of Germany. Other installations included Boeing, Martin Marietta, Purdue University, and General Electric.

Mr. Miller left the full time management of Denelcor in 1981..."

"The Denelcor HEP was a uniform shared memory multiprocessor that used fine-grain multithreading to tolerate memory latency, synchronization latency, and even functional unit latency. Six systems were delivered to customers during the years 1981-1985." "Smith was also the primary architect for what was another ground- breaking system in the early 1980s, the Denelcor HEP. The HEP was the first commercial system designed to apply multiple processors to a single computation, and the first to have multithreaded CPUs. Smith, Denelcor's Vice President of Research and Development from 1981 to 1985, also designed part of the HEP's hardware, including the interconnection network, and funded the development of automatic parallelizing compilers for the system." NOTE: Smith is a living person.

The Denelcor HEP was (one of) the computer(s)used in the 1984 movie The Last Star Fighter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter) Other sources:

Youngsmyth (talk) 03:33, 28 July 2010 (UTC)