It is extremely difficult to read and understand a file of even a few Mbytes in length. As the volume of data increases, the visual representation of data quickly becomes the most practical method of understanding the data. The aim of this course is to provide a practical introduction to visualisation, and to provide the student with sufficient information to produce visualisations such as the one shown below. Course dates This course will run once each term. Whereas scalar processing requires a separate instruction cycle for each operation, vector processing requires only one instruction to carry out all calculations on an entire list of operands.
Vector computers have hardware to perform the vector operations efficiently.
This hardware has the special ability to overlap or pipeline operand processing. The pipeline is divided up into individual segments, each of which is completely independent. This means that the machine can work on separate operands at the same time. This ability enables it to produce one result per clock period once the pipeline is full. The same instruction is obeyed repeatedly using the pipeline technique so the vector processor processes all the elements of a vector in exactly the same way.