Computer Systems

The basics of the computer systems in wide use in scientific computation are gathered here. In particular the systems accessible at UNC will be covered concurrently with their use in the SCC meetings

DEC Alpha

The Alpha processor was developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). DEC was subsequently bought by Compaq, Compaq merged with HP.

The Alpha processor is a 64-bit RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) processor which is especially well suited to floating point computation.

A 4 CPU machine named k2.amath.unc.edu is in operation at UNC and maintained by ATN.