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structure. In practice, it intended to make a shift from widely-used general-purpose architectures to more flexible
multi-purpose architectures easily customized for specific application areas. The idea of the MARS architecture
originated at the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk. MARS-M was also designed
in the Novosibirsk scientific centre Akademgorodok with the support from the Elbrus project. The only prototype
of MARS-M was built using the Elbrus-2 hardware technology. With the clock frequency 10MHz, the minimal
configuration reached the peak performance of 20 MFLOPS due to the VLIW instruction set and functional con-
currency.
MVS
MVS is the Russian abbreviation for Microprocessor Computing Systems, multiprocessor systems built of a
(large) number of COTS (commercial off-the -shelf) microprocessors. The MVS chief architect, Vladimir K.
Levin, was among the leading designers of Soviet computers since the 1950s mostly focusing on high-perfor-
mance computers for special applications. He started to work on the MVS in the 1980s and completed them in
the 1990s, in the post-Soviet Russia, probably beating the record of professional longevity among the Russian
computer architects.
MVS-100 was based on microprocessors with speed of about 100 MIPS, the interprocessor communication was
provided by transputers. The MVS-100s with the speed up to 50 billion operations per second were successfully
used in several data centers of the Russian Academy of Sciences and in industrial data centers. They were suc-
cessfully used for solving complex application problems of aerodynamics for aircraft and a jet engine, nuclear
physics, dynamic systems control, pattern recognition for navigation of moving objects, seismology, meteorolo-
gy, bioengineering, and others. The possibility of an effective parallel computing and processing data.
MVS-1000 was built on microprocessors Alpha with the speed up to 1.2 billion operations per second. The total
performance of the system installed at the Joint Supercomputer Center of the Academy of Science and Ministry
of Education reached 200 billion operations per second.
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