Stardent Computer, Inc. was a manufacturer of graphics supercomputer workstations in the late 1980s. The company was formed in 1989 when Ardent Computer Corporation (formerly Dana Computer, Inc.) and Stellar Computer Inc. merged.

History

Stellar Computer

Stellar Computer was founded in 1985 in

Newton, Massachusetts Newton is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is approximately west of downtown Boston. Newton resembles a patchwork of thirteen villages, without a city center. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, the population of Ne ...

, and headed by William Poduska, who had previously founded

Prime Computer Prime Computer, Inc. was a Natick, Massachusetts-based producer of minicomputers from 1972 until 1992. With the advent of PCs and the decline of the minicomputer industry, Prime was forced out of the market in the early 1990s, and by the end of ...

and

Apollo Computer Apollo Computer Inc., founded in 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, by William Poduska (a founder of Prime Computer) and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo ...

. This company aimed to produce a

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workstat ...

system with enough performance to be a serious threat to the Titan, and at a lower price. Ardent responded by starting work on a new desktop system called ''Stiletto'', which featured two MIPS

R3000 The R3000 is a 32-bit RISC microprocessor chipset developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implemented the MIPS I instruction set architecture (ISA). Introduced in June 1988, it was the second MIPS implementation, succeeding the R2000 as the flag ...

s (paired with two R3010 FPUs) and four i860s for graphics processing (the i860s replaced the vector units). Their first product was demonstrated in March 1988. An investment from Japanese company

Mitsui is one of the largest ''keiretsu'' in Japan and one of the largest corporate groups in the world. The major companies of the group include Mitsui & Co. ( general trading company), Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Nippon Paper Industries ...

and others was announced in June 1988, bringing the total capital raised to $48 million.

Ardent Computer Corporation

At almost the same time, in November 1985, Allen H. Michels and Matthew Sanders III co-founded Dana Computer, Inc. in Sunnyvale, California. The company sought to produce a desktop multiprocessing supercomputer dedicated to graphics that could support up to four processor units. Each processor unit consisted initially of a MIPS R2000 CPU, and later a

, connected to a custom

vector processor 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 calle ...

. The vector unit held 8,192 64-bit registers that could be used in any way from 8,192 one-word to thirty-two 256-word registers. This compares to modern

SIMD Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD can be internal (part of the hardware design) and it can be directly accessible through an instruction set architecture (ISA), but it shoul ...

systems which allow for perhaps eight to sixteen 128-bit registers with a small variety of addressing schemes. Their goal was to release their ''Titan'' supercomputer in July 1987 at a $50,000 price point. By late 1986, however, it became clear that this was unrealistic. A second round of funding came from

Kubota Corporation Kubota machine is a Japanese multinational corporation based in Osaka. It was established in 1890. The corporation produces many products including tractors and other agricultural machinery, construction equipment, engines, vending machines, p ...

, a Japanese heavy industries company, which had cash to spare and was looking for new opportunities. Kubota agreed not only to fund the completion of the Titan but also to provide production facilities in Japan. By the time it was finally ready for testing in February 1988, the performance leadership position of Titan had been eroded and the price had risen to $80,000. Ardent software ran on

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

System V Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...

Release 3 with proprietary support for the four-way SMP and the

. The compiler was based on the

Convex Convex or convexity may refer to: Science and technology * Convex lens, in optics Mathematics * Convex set, containing the whole line segment that joins points ** Convex polygon, a polygon which encloses a convex set of points ** Convex polytop ...

Fortran (and C) compiler. Their significant graphics system for visualization was DORE (Dynamic Object Rendering Environment). In December 1987, Dana changed its name to Ardent Computer after learning about a local disk drive company called Dana Computer.

Gordon Bell Chester Gordon Bell (born August 19, 1934) is an American electrical engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later became Vice President of Engi ...

, who had been architect of the

VAX VAX (an acronym for Virtual Address eXtension) is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The V ...

computer, was VP of Engineering and an early member of Ardent. Michels had considered working with Poduska, but founded

Convergent Technologies Convergent Technologies was an American computer company formed by a small group of people who left Intel Corporation and Xerox PARC in 1979. Among the founders were CEO Allen Michels, VP Engineering Bob Garrow, head of marketing Kal Hubler, and ...

instead, before Ardent. Japan-based

became a major investor, owning up to 44% of Ardent. After some delay, a product was introduced in 1988.

Formation of Stardent

The merger of the two rivals was announced on August 30, 1989, and completed in November 1989, with Poduska as chief executive. Bell served as chief scientist. Although the Stardent products were known for their high performance, they also demanded high prices. A 1990 model was quoted at $123,400, for example, although this price was much less than that of the

Cray Y-MP The Cray Y-MP was a supercomputer sold by Cray Research from 1988, and the successor to the company's X-MP. The Y-MP retained software compatibility with the X-MP, but extended the address registers from 24 to 32 bits. High-density VLSI ECL tec ...

. Kubota is alleged to have forced the merger; in an odd twist, the original Stellar group was left with most of the corporate power. A number of the Ardent employees were less than happy with this move, and quit to form other companies. Others attempted to get Kubota to spin off the original development group as a new company called ''Comet'', but nothing came of this. In early July 1990, the California portion of Stardent was transferred to the company headquarters in Massachusetts. Co-chairmen Michels and Sanders brought suit against Kubota on July 13 for $25 million in damages, contending that Kubota used its financial leverage over Ardent to force it to merge and then transfer people and technology into a Kubota unit. On July 24, 1990, Stardent fired co-chairmen Michels and Sanders, after offering a settlement to avoid publicity. In August, the board of directors dismissed Michels and Sanders from the board, and agreed to sell more equity in the company to Kubota for an additional $60 million. In August 1991, Stardent spun off its popular Application Visualization System (AVS) software into a separate company. In November of that same year, Stardent announced that it would cease to operate under the name Stardent Computer, sell off its Titan workstation operations to Kubota Pacific Computers, find a buyer for its Vistra workstations and create a new company called GS Computer Services to provide maintenance and support for its discontinued GS series workstations it inherited from Stellar. Investors lost an estimated $200 million. The remainder of the company would focus on the AVS software system and the existing shareholders of Stardent would become shareholders of the software firm. By the end of the year, the company had given up on finding a buyer, believed to be

Oki Electric , commonly referred to as OKI, OKI Electric or the OKI Group, is a Japanese information and communications technology company, headquartered in Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo and operating in over 120 countries around the world. OKI produced the fi ...

, for the Vistra line of workstations but still hoped to sell the underlying graphics technology based on the

Intel i860 The Intel i860 (also known as 80860) is a RISC microprocessor design introduced by Intel in 1989. It is one of Intel's first attempts at an entirely new, high-end instruction set architecture since the failed Intel iAPX 432 from the beginning of ...

. Stardent decided to liquidate rather than pursuing new funding from Kubota Corporation. Its sales were estimated at only $40 million in 1990, which limited its ability to compete with other workstation manufacturers such as IBM, HP, and

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and sof ...

. Kubota Pacific cast about looking for direction, before finally settling on a desktop-sized 3D graphics accelerator for the Alpha-based

DEC 3000 AXP DEC 3000 AXP was the name given to a series of computer workstations and servers, produced from 1992 to around 1995 by Digital Equipment Corporation. The DEC 3000 AXP series formed part of the first generation of computer systems based on the 64- ...

workstations, called ''Denali''. The company also bought DEC 3000 AXP workstations, packaged them with the Denali, and sold the integrated product as the ''Kenai'' workstation. The company changed its name again, becoming Kubota Graphics Company which closed down in 1994.

AccelGraphics

In 1994, Kubota Graphics was bought by AccelGraphics, the maker of AccelGraphics AG300 and AG500. AccelGraphics in turn was acquired by

Evans & Sutherland Evans & Sutherland is a pioneering American computer firm in the computer graphics field. Its current products are used in digital projection environments like planetariums. Its simulation business, which it sold to Rockwell Collins, sold products ...

in 1998.

Products

* Titan workstation * Vistra workstation

Stellar Graphics Supercomputer

The Stellar line was called the graphics supercomputer (GS). It was considered an advanced design for the late 1980s. The Stellar GS workstation family consisted of the GS1000 and GS2000 models. After Stellar merged with Ardent to form Stardent they were sold as the ST1000 and ST2000 models. The GS2000 CPU supported four threads or streams of execution for a total of 20 MIPS and had a vector coprocessor capable of 80 MFLOPS. 16 to 128MB of system memory was supported. 64MB of memory was typical. The four threads were implemented using a

Barrel processor A barrel processor is a CPU that switches between threads of execution on every cycle. This CPU design technique is also known as "interleaved" or "fine-grained" temporal multithreading. Unlike simultaneous multithreading in modern superscala ...

design similar to that used in the

CDC 6000 series The CDC 6000 series is a discontinued family of mainframe computers manufactured by Control Data Corporation in the 1960s. It consisted of the CDC 6200, CDC 6300, CDC 6400, CDC 6500, CDC 6600 and CDC 6700 computers, which were all extremely rapid ...

and the Denelcor HEP. The GS2000 graphics subsystem supported interactive 3D rendering at rates of up to 120,000 Gouraud-shaded triangles per second and 600,000 short vectors per second. Texture mapping and antialiasing with an accumulation buffer were also supported. The CPU and graphics system shared the system memory and vector coprocessor. The GS workstations used the

X window system The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

and the 3D hardware was programmed through an X extension known as XFDI (X Floating-point Device Interface). There were bindings for C and Fortran. The display supported 1280 by 1024 resolution at 12 or 24 bits per pixel (in pseudo-color and true-color modes). 12 and 24-bit Z buffers were supported. The GS2000 cabinet was quite large: approximately 30 inches wide by 48 inches tall by 36 inches deep. There was a companion expansion chassis of about the same size which could contain a 9-track tape drive, for example.

References

External links

Ardent Titan C compiler auto-vectorization and assembly code sample

* ttps://www.vaxbarn.com/index.php/other-bits/565-ardent-titan Pictures of the Ardent Titan at the VAXbarn 1985 establishments in Massachusetts 1994 disestablishments in Massachusetts American companies established in 1985 American companies disestablished in 1994 Companies based in Silicon Valley Computer companies established in 1985 Computer companies disestablished in 1994 Computer workstations Defunct computer companies based in California Defunct computer companies based in Massachusetts Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies MIPS architecture