Background
Typical scientific workloads consist of reading in large data sets, transforming them in some way, and then writing them back out again. Normally the transformations being applied are identical across all of the data points in the set. For instance, the program might add 5 to every number in a set of a million numbers. In traditional computers the program would loop over all million numbers, adding five, thereby executing a million instructions saying a = add b, c. Internally the computer solves this instruction in several steps. First it reads the instruction from memory and decodes it, then it collects any additional information it needs, in this case the numbers b and c, and then finally runs the operation and stores the results.
Read more about this topic: Cray-1
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