Comment by jandrewrogers
16 hours ago
I worked on the MTA architectures for years among several other HPC systems but I don’t remember this particular benchmark. I suspect it was replaced by the Graph500 benchmark. Graph500 measures something similar and was introduced only a few years after GUPS.
The HPCS benchmarks predated Graph500. They were talked about at SC for a few years in the early 2000s but mostly faded into the background. It’s hard to dig up the numbers for the MTA on RandomAccess, but the Eldorado paper from ‘05 by Feo and friends (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1062261.1062268) mentions it and you can see the MTA beating the other popular architectures of the time in one of the tables.
Feo was a major MTA stan and proponent, even years later. Honestly, it is probably my favorite computing architecture of all time despite the weaknesses of the implementation. It was extraordinarily efficient in some contexts. Few people could design properly optimized code for them though, which was an additional problem.
There were proofs of concept by 2010 that the latency-hiding mechanics could be implemented on CPUs in software, which while not as efficient had the advantage of cost and performance, which was a death knell for the MTA. A few attempts to revive that style of architecture have come and gone. It is very difficult to compete with the economics of mass-scale commodity silicon.
I hold out hope that a modern barrel processor will become available at some point but I’m not sanguine about it.