High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The NYU Ultracomputer is a significant processor design in the history of parallel computing. The system has N processors, N memories and an N log N message-passing switch connecting them. The switch uses an innovative fetch-and-add instruction which will combine references from several processors into a single reference, to reduce memory contention.The machine was developed in the 1980s at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences Computer Science Department. Most of the work done was theoretical.