The El'brus-3 and MARS-M: Recent advances in Russian high-performance computing

The El'brus-3 and MARS-M represent two recent efforts to address the Soviet Union's high-performance computing needs through original, indigenous development. The El'brus-3 extends very long instruction word (VLIW) concepts to a multiprocessor environment and offers features that increase performance and efficiency and decrease code size for both scientific and general-purpose applications. It incorporates procedure static and globally dynamic instruction scheduling, multiple, simultaneous branch path execution, and iteration frames for executing loops with recurrences and conditional branches. The MARS-M integrates VLIW, data flow, decoupled heterogeneous processors, and hierarchical systems into a unified framework. It also offers a combination of static and dynamic VLIW scheduling. While the viability of these machines has been demonstrated, significant barriers to their production and use remain.