Selma

In the summer of 1996, a Fujitsu VX/2 distributed memory vector computer was installed at PDC. The number 2 in the model Fujitsu VX/2 means that the system was equipped with two processors, which were also referred to as Processing Elements (PE) by Fujitsu. These processors each consisted of a scalar unit and a vector unit and could achieve 2.2 gigaflops. They each had 2 GByte of memory. The processors were connected through a high speed Crossbar network with a transfer rate of 570 MByte/s in each direction. The system had 28 GByte of disk space .

 The system was named Selma in honour of the Swedish author and poet Selma Lagerlöf , who was awarded the 1909 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Selma was very fast at vector calculations and it was possible to reach 50-70% of the peak performance with suitable vectorised code. The operating system, UXP/V, was based on the UNIX System V release 4, and the system behaved as a UNIX workstation. The most mature programming environment for the system was based on Fujitsu's Fortran90 compiler. C compilers were also available. The PVM message passing environment was available initially and MPI became available later on.

The Selma system was upgraded in April 1998 with one more processor, giving a total peak performance 6.6 gigaflops and a total of 6 GB of memory. Both PVM and MPI were available for parallel programming using either Fortran or C. The system was also equipped with 36 GB of Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) disk and 63 GB of high performace High Performance Parallel Interface (HIPPI) disk storage.