Development of APE computers was started by theoretical physicists at INFN to satisfy the huge amounts of compute power in theoretical particle physics in a cost-efficient way. For many years these kind of massively-parallel computers have played an important role for numerical simulations of Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the discretised formulation of the fundamental theory of strong interactions.

The APE machines are based on the simple but efficient Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) architecture. The custom designed VLIW processors are application optimized. Due to a powerful 3-dimensional communication network the APE machines are highly scalable.

Here is a brief overview on the various generations of APE machines:

• APE1 had a peak performance of 1 GFlops and started physics production in 1987.


• The second generation of APE computers, APE100 with a peak performance up to 100 GFlops came into operation 1994.


• APEmille was developed with contributions from DESY and large systems have been installed at various European sites since 2000 with an overall peak performance of 2 TFlops.


• apeNEXT was jointly developed by INFN, DESY, and University of Paris. Deployment of multi-Tflops installations started in autumn 2005.