APE100 was a family of SIMD

SIMD

Single instruction, multiple data , is a class of parallel computers in Flynn's taxonomy. It describes computers with multiple processing elements that perform the same operation on multiple data simultaneously...

 supercomputer

Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...

s developed by the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare

Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare

The Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare is the coordinating institution for nuclear, particle and astroparticle physics in Italy. It was founded on the 8th of August 1951, to further the nuclear physics research tradition initiated by Enrico Fermi in Rome, in the 1930s...

 (INFN) in Italy between 1989 and 1994. The systems were developed to study the structure of elementary particle

Elementary particle

In particle physics, an elementary particle or fundamental particle is a particle not known to have substructure; that is, it is not known to be made up of smaller particles. If an elementary particle truly has no substructure, then it is one of the basic building blocks of the universe from which...

s by means of lattice gauge theories

Lattice gauge theory

In physics, lattice gauge theory is the study of gauge theories on a spacetime that has been discretized into a lattice. Gauge theories are important in particle physics, and include the prevailing theories of elementary particles: quantum electrodynamics, quantum chromodynamics and the Standard...

, especially quantum chromodynamics

Quantum chromodynamics

In theoretical physics, quantum chromodynamics is a theory of the strong interaction , a fundamental force describing the interactions of the quarks and gluons making up hadrons . It is the study of the SU Yang–Mills theory of color-charged fermions...

.

APE ("ah-pei"), an acronym for Array Processor Experiment, was the collective name of several generations of massively parallel supercomputers since 1984, optimized for theoretical physics simulations. The APE machines were massively parallel 3D arrays of custom computing nodes with periodic boundary conditions.

APE100 was developed at INFN in Rome and Pisa under the direction of Nicola Cabibbo

Nicola Cabibbo

Nicola Cabibbo was an Italian physicist, best known for his work on the weak interaction. He was also the president of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics from 1983 to 1992, and from 1993 until his death he was the president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences...

. Each node was capable of 50MFLOPS so that the complete configuration with 2,048 nodes had a performance of 100GFLOPS. In 1991, it became the most powerful supercomputer in the world.

A version of APE100 has been marketed by Alcatel Alenia Space under the name of Quadrics

Quadrics

Quadrics was a supercomputer company formed in 1996 as a joint venture between Alenia Spazio and the technical team from Meiko Scientific. They produced hardware and software for clustering commodity computer systems into massively parallel systems. Their highpoint was in June 2003 when six out of...

. After 1994 the project at INFN was continued with the new names APEmille and ApeNext.