APE-100 Computer: (i) The Architecture

We describe APE-100, a SIMD, modular parallel processor architecture for large scale scientific computations. The largest configuration that will be implemented in the present design will deliver a peak speed of 100 Gflops. This performance is, for instance, required for high precision computations in Quantum Chromo Dynamics, for which APE-100 is very well suited. Keywords: Parallelism, architectures, floating point, VLSI. 1. Overview. In the years 1985\Gamma1987, the APE collaboration has been involved in a major effort to design and build a parallel computer in the 1 Gflops range. APE [1] has been one among several projects [2] that have built floating point engines mainly tailored to the requirements of numerical simulations of Lattice Gauge Theories (LGT) and especially of Lattice Quantum Chromo Dynamics [3] (QCD), the gauge theory which, in the continuum limit, is supposed to describe the strong interactions between elementary particles. Three APE units, featuring floating poi..