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Minisupercomputer
Minisupercomputers constituted a short-lived class of computers that emerged in the mid-1980s, characterized by the combination of vector processing and small-scale multiprocessing. As scientific computing using vector processors became more popular, the need for lower-cost systems that might be used at the departmental level instead of the corporate level created an opportunity for new computer vendors to enter the market. As a generalization, the price targets for these smaller computers were one-tenth of the larger supercomputers. Several notable technical, economic, and political attributes characterize minisupercomputers. First, they were architecturally more diverse than prior mainframes and minicomputers in hardware and less diverse in software. Second, advances in VLSI made them less expensive (mini-price). These machines were market targeted to be cost-effective and quickly manufactured. Third, it is notable who did not manufacture minisupercomputers: within the USA, IBM ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alliant Computer Systems
Alliant Computer Systems Corporation was a computer company that designed and manufactured parallel computing systems. Together with Pyramid Technology and Sequent Computer Systems, Alliant's machines pioneered the symmetric multiprocessing market. One of the more successful companies in the group, over 650 Alliant systems were produced over their lifetime. The company was hit by a series of financial problems and went bankrupt in 1992. History 1980s Alliant was founded, as Dataflow Systems, in May 1982 by Ron Gruner, Craig Mundie and Rich McAndrew to produce machines for scientific and engineering users who needed smaller, less costly machines than offerings from Cray Computer and similar high-end vendors. Machines that addressed this market segment later became known as minisupercomputers. At the time there was a huge gap on the price/performance curve as a highly configured VAX 11/780 had a performance of about a MIP and MegaFLOP for around $1M USD and a Cray-1S or Cray 1M over ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Convex Computer
Convex Computer Corporation was a company that developed, manufactured and marketed Vector processor, vector minisupercomputers and supercomputers for small-to-medium-sized businesses. Their later Exemplar series of parallel computing machines were based on the Hewlett-Packard (HP) PA-RISC microprocessors, and in 1995, HP bought the company. Exemplar machines were offered for sale by HP for some time, and Exemplar technology was used in HP's V-Class machines. History Convex was formed in 1982 by Bob Paluck and Steve Wallach in Richardson, Texas. It was originally named Parsec and early prototype and production boards bear that name. They planned on producing a machine very similar in architecture to the Cray Research vector processor machines, with a somewhat lower performance, but with a much better price/performance ratio. In order to lower costs, the Convex designs were not as technologically aggressive as Cray's, and were based on more mainstream chip technology, attempting to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vector Processing
In computing, a vector processor or array processor is a central processing unit (CPU) that implements an instruction set where its instructions are designed to operate efficiently and effectively on large one-dimensional arrays of data called ''vectors''. This is in contrast to scalar processors, whose instructions operate on single data items only, and in contrast to some of those same scalar processors having additional single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) or SWAR Arithmetic Units. Vector processors can greatly improve performance on certain workloads, notably numerical simulation and similar tasks. Vector processing techniques also operate in video-game console hardware and in graphics accelerators. Vector machines appeared in the early 1970s and dominated supercomputer design through the 1970s into the 1990s, notably the various Cray platforms. The rapid fall in the price-to-performance ratio of conventional microprocessor designs led to a decline in vector supercomput ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cray Research
Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the TOP500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world. Cray manufactures its products in part in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, where its founder, Seymour Cray, was born and raised. The company also has offices in Bloomington, Minnesota (which have been converted to Hewlett Packard Enterprise offices), and numerous other sales, service, engineering, and R&D locations around the world. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. (CRI), was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray. Seymour Cray later formed Cray Computer Corporation (CCC) in 1989, which went bankrupt in 1995. Cray Research was acquired by Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 1996. Cray Inc. was formed in 2000 when Tera Computer Company purchased the Cray Res ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Encore Computer
Encore Computer was an early pioneer in the parallel computing market, based in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Although offering several system designs beginning in 1985, they were never as well known as other companies in this field such as Pyramid Technology, Alliant Computer Systems, Alliant, and the most similar systems Sequent Computer Systems, Sequent and FLEX. Encore was founded in 1983 by: Kenneth Fisher, former CEO of Prime Computer; Gordon Bell, an engineering vice president from Digital Equipment Corporation responsible for the development of the VAX; and, Henry Burkhardt III, co-founder of Data General and Kendall Square Research. Their goal was to build massively parallel machines from commodity processors; their first design, the Multimax, was released in September 1985. This was one of the first commercial designs to make use of bus snooping, allowing many processors to share the same memory efficiently. History In 1988 Encore purchased the former Systems Engineering ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elxsi
Elxsi Corporation was a minicomputer manufacturing company established in the late 1970s in Silicon Valley, USA, along with a host of competitors ( Trilogy Systems, Sequent, Convex Computer). The Elxsi processor was an Emitter Coupled Logic (ECL) design that featured a 50-nanosecond clock, a 25-nanosecond back panel bus, IEEE floating-point arithmetic and a 64-bit architecture. It allowed multiple processors to communicate over a common bus called the Gigabus, believed to be the first company to do so. The operating system was a message-based operating system called EMBOS. The Elxsi CPU was a microcoded design, allowing custom instructions to be coded into microcode. History Elxsi was founded in 1979 by Joe Rizzi (previously a manager at Intersil) and Thampy Thomas (who would go on to found NexGen Microsystems). It is believed that Elxsi was the first startup founded by an Indian in Silicon Valley. Much of the architecture of the Elxsi machine was designed by former Stanford ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Compaq
Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compatible computers, being the second company after Columbia Data Products to legally reverse engineer the IBM Personal Computer. It rose to become the largest supplier of PC systems during the 1990s before being overtaken by Dell in 2001. Struggling to keep up in the price wars against Dell, as well as with a risky acquisition of DEC, Compaq was acquired for US$25 billion by HP in 2002. The Compaq brand remained in use by HP for lower-end systems until 2013 when it was discontinued. Since 2013, the brand is currently licensed to third parties for use on electronics in Brazil and India. The company was formed by Rod Canion, Jim Harris, and Bill Murto, all of whom were former Texas Instruments senior managers. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
VAX 9000
The VAX 9000 is a discontinued family of Minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using custom ECL-based processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA). Equipped with optional vector processors, they were marketed into the supercomputer space as well. As with other VAX systems, they were sold with either the VMS or Ultrix operating systems. The systems trace their history to DEC's 1984 licensing of several technologies from Trilogy Systems, who had introduced a new way to densely pack ECL chips into complex modules. Development of the 9000 design began in 1986, intended as a replacement for the VAX 8800 family, at that time the high-end VAX offering. The initial plans called for two general models, the high-performance ''Aquarius'' using water cooling as seen on IBM systems, and the midrange-performance ''Aridus'' systems using air cooling. During development, engineers so improved the air cooling system that Aquarius ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline. The company produced many different product lines over its history. It is best known for the work in the minicomputer market starting in the mid-1960s. The company produced a series of machines known as the PDP line, with the PDP-8 and PDP-11 being among the most successful minis in history. Their success was only surpassed by another DEC product, the late-1970s VAX "supermini" systems that were designed to replace the PDP-11. Although a number of competitors had successfully competed with Digital through the 1970s, the VAX cemented the company's place as a leading vendor in the computer space. As microcomputers improved in the late 1980s, especially wit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cydrome
Cydrome (1984−1988) was a computer company established in San Jose of the Silicon Valley region in California. Its mission was to develop a numeric processor. The founders were David Yen, Wei Yen, Ross Towle, Arun Kumar, and Bob Rau (the chief architect). History The company was originally named ”Axiom Systems". However another company in San Diego called "Axiom" was founded earlier. Axiom Systems called its architecture "SPARC". It sold the rights to the name (but not the architecture) to Sun Microsystems and used the money to hire NameLab to come up with a new company name. They came up with "Cydrome" from "cyber" (computer) "drome" (racecourse). Cydrome moved from an office in San Jose to a business park in Milpitas on President's Day 1985. This site was used to host meetings of the Bay Area ACM chapter's Special Interest Group in Large Scale Systems (SIGBIG), in contrast to then SIGSMALL for microcomputers which are now called "PCs" and its present-day national SIGHP ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Culler Scientific
Culler is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: * David Culler (born 1959), computer scientist *Dick Culler (1915–1964), baseball shortstop * Glen Culler (1927–2003), professor of electrical engineering *Marc Culler Marc Edward Culler (born November 22, 1953) is an American mathematician who works in geometric group theory and low-dimensional topology. A native Californian, Culler did his undergraduate work at the University of California at Santa Barbara and ... (born 1953), American mathematician * Jonathan Culler (born 1944), Professor of English at Cornell University {{surname, Culler ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Culler Harris
Culler is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: * David Culler (born 1959), computer scientist *Dick Culler (1915–1964), baseball shortstop * Glen Culler (1927–2003), professor of electrical engineering *Marc Culler Marc Edward Culler (born November 22, 1953) is an American mathematician who works in geometric group theory and low-dimensional topology. A native Californian, Culler did his undergraduate work at the University of California at Santa Barbara and ... (born 1953), American mathematician * Jonathan Culler (born 1944), Professor of English at Cornell University {{surname, Culler ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
