High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The ILLIAC IV was one of the most infamous supercomputers ever built. One of a series of research machines, the ILLIACs from the University of Illinois, the ILLIAC IV design featured fairly high parallelism with up to 256 processors, used to allow the machine to work on large data sets in what would later be known as vector processing. The machine was finally ready for operation in 1976, after a decade of development that was now late, over budget, and outperformed by existing commercial machines like the Cray-1.