Large-scale scientific application programs in chemistry and physics on an experimental parallel computer system

We present and discuss an experimental distributed system consisting of two IBM 4341s, an IBM 4381, and ten FPS-164 attached processors, configured to allow parallel execution of a single large-scale calculation on multiple processors. A number of our application programs have been converted to run on this system, and the strategy for this conversion is outlined in sufficient detail to facilitate the development of tests using other scientific and engineering computer application programs. Our tests, though limited to certain biochemical and physicochemical problems, demonstrate the versatility, flexibility, and accessibility of this system, and we find performance comparable to that of today's supercomputers, which suggests that our approach can provide a practical answer to many large-scale computer applications.