University of Central Florida STARS Retrospective Theses and Dissertations 1977 Hardware and Software Considerations for Improving the Throughput of Scientific Computation Computers Glenn Allen Sullivan University of Central Florida Part of the Engineering Commons Find similar works at: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/rtd University of Central Florida Libraries http://library.ucf.edu This Masters Thesis (Open Access) is brought to you for free and open access by STARS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of STARS. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. STARS Citation Sullivan, Glenn Allen, "Hardware and Software Considerations for Improving the Throughput of Scientific Computation Computers" (1977). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 382. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/rtd/382 HARDWARE Al~D SOFTWARE CONSIDERATIONS FOR IMPROVING THE THROUGHPUT OF SCIENTIFIC COMPUTATION -.- COMPUTERS BY GLENN ALLEN SULLIVAN B.S.E. Florida Technological University, 1971 THESIS Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Engineering in the Graduate Studies Program of the College of Engineering of Florida Technological University Orlando, Florida 1977 HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE CONSIDERATIONS FOR IMPROVING THE THROUGHPUT OF SCIENTIFIC COMPUTATION COMPurERS by Glenn Allen Sullivan ABSTRAcr In this paper, hardware and software techniques are pre- sented for improving the Throughput (defined as Computations per dollar) of computing systems which are oriented towards high- precision floating point computations. The various improvements are referenced to a baseline of the PDP 11/20, the NOVA 1200, and the TI 960A, all 16 bit minicomputers. The most beneficial hard- ware improvement is the inclusion of a Floating Point Processor, which yields up to 200X Throughput increase over a software floating point package.