Warp: a systolic computer in a van
In February 1986 General Electric delivered to Carnegie Mellon the first ten-cell prototype of Warp, a systolic array of linearly connected programmable cells, each capable of 10 million floating-point operations a second, 100 MFLOPS in all. The machine was built for the vision of robot vehicles and rode in the Navlab van.
Why it matters
The systolic array stopped being a diagram: vision programs ran on it daily, and from September 1987 neural network training too. ALVINN's network, which steered the van, was trained on Warp, so training a network here already ran on specialised hardware rather than an ordinary computer.
The project started in 1984 and a two-cell prototype was completed in 1985. General Electric and Honeywell built two wire-wrapped ten-cell prototypes (February and June 1986); General Electric's production PC Warp was delivered from April 1987 at about $350,000. The authors write that Warp is typically several hundred times faster than a VAX 11/780; road following on the prototype took 6,000 ms, a speed-up of 200. Pomerleau, Gusciora, Touretzky and Kung, 1988: one learning trial takes 0.82 ms, about 17 million connections a second; a road network of 105,084 connections trained for 40 epochs on about 50,000 synthetic images in about 3.5 hours of Warp CPU time. While driving, ALVINN by its own 1988 paper still ran on the on-board Sun. What the record does not claim: that the Warp papers name the Navlab; the word does not occur there, and the name comes from the 1988 paper.