ABSTRACT
The Processor Array experiment (PAX) idea was to capitalize on the obvious parallelism in many continuum problems, and the rapidly decreasing costs of computer hardware, along with its associated miniaturization. These ideas have been pursued by other researchers, and PAX was in many ways inspired by research on the ILLIACIV. The PAX computer system consists of an array of processing units (PUs), a host computer, and an interface unit (HPI) to communicate between the host and the PUs. One particularly interesting design feature of all PAX computers is the provision for fast floating-point computation. The host computer on Quantum chromodynamics (QCD)PAX runs a standard version of UNIX. In QCDPAX each PU contains a vector processing unit with floating-point hardware, memory, and control circuitry. QCDPAX joins together most of the original PAX researchers with physicists interested in a special problem, QCD, and its discrete model, lattice guage theory.
