Burroughs Scientific Processor

The Burroughs Scientific Processor, or BSP, was a one-off supercomputer built by Burroughs Corporation that combined features from the early massively parallel computer PEPE with a high-performance gather/scatter system. The system used a single Control Processor that fed instructions to a Parallel Processor with sixteen units. Its peak performance was about 50 million floating point operations per second (50 MFLOPS), and real-world performance was over 20 MFLOPS, almost the same as the real-world performance of a Cray-1.

Development began in 1973, shortly after Burroughs began building the PEPE machine for the US Army. PEPE was designed to be a much larger machine with up to 288 processors, allowing it to track every visible nuclear warhead launched from the Soviet Union in an all-out ICBM attack. The BSP was essentially a version of the PEPE system scaled down to smaller sizes. When it was announced, the 50 MFLOPS speed of the BSP would make it among the fastest machines in the world, but it was simpler than the other high-end designs. The prototype was delivered in 1978, by which time new machines like the Cray-1 had shipped, and there were no sales for the BSP.