The El'brus-3 and MARS-M: Recent advances in Russian high-performance computing

The El'brus-3 and MARS-M represent two recent efforts to address the Soviet Union's high-performance computing needs through original, indigenous development. The El'brus-3 extends very long instruction word (VLIW) concepts to a multiprocessor environment and offers features that increase performance and efficiency and decrease code size for both scientific and general-purpose applications. It incorporates procedure static and globally dynamic instruction scheduling, multiple, simultaneous branch path execution, and iteration frames for executing loops with recurrences and conditional branches. The MARS-M integrates VLIW, data flow, decoupled heterogeneous processors, and hierarchical systems into a unified framework. It also offers a combination of static and dynamic VLIW scheduling. While the viability of these machines has been demonstrated, significant barriers to their production and use remain.This paper was written nearly entirely by means of e-mail between Tucson and Novosibirsk. It is one of the first examples of this type of collaboration between Russian and American colleagues.