The Caltech Cosmic Cube was a
parallel computer, developed by Charles Seitz and
Geoffrey C Fox from 1981 onward. It was the first working
hypercube
In geometry, a hypercube is an ''n''-dimensional analogue of a square () and a cube (). It is a closed, compact, convex figure whose 1- skeleton consists of groups of opposite parallel line segments aligned in each of the space's dimensions, ...
built.
It was an early attempt to capitalise on
VLSI to speed up scientific calculations at a reasonable cost. Using commodity hardware and an architecture suited to the specific task (
QCD), Fox and Seitz demonstrated that this was indeed possible.
In 1984 a group at
Intel including
Justin Rattner and
Cleve Moler developed the
Intel iPSC inspired by the Cosmic Cube.
In 1987 several people in the group formed a company called
Parasoft to commercialize the message passing interface developed for the Cosmic Cube.
Characteristics
* 64
Intel 8086/87 processors
Birth of the Hypercube
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* 128kB of memory per processor
* 6-dimensional hypercube network, i. e. each processor can directly exchange data with six other processors.
References
The Torus Routing Chip
Parallel Computer Archival Documents
* John Apostolakis, Clive Baillie, Robert W. Clayton, Hong Ding, Jon Flower, Geoffrey C. Fox, Thomas D. Gottschalk, Bradford H. Hager, Herbert B. Keller
Herbert Bishop Keller (19 June 1925 in Paterson, New Jersey – 26 January 2008 in Pasadena, California) was an American applied mathematician and numerical analyst. He was professor of applied mathematics, emeritus, at the California Institute ...
, Adam K. Kolawa, Steve W. Otto, Toshiro Tanimoto, Eric F. van de Velde, J. Barhen, J. R. Einstein, and C. C. Jorgensen. 1989. "Supercomputer applications of the hypercube"—In ''Supercomputing systems: architectures, design, and performance'', Svetlana P. Kartashev and Steven I. Kartashev (Eds.). Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., New York, NY, USA:1989 Pages 480–577.
External links
The C Programmer's Abbreviated Guide to Multicomputer Programming
{{Parallel Computing
Parallel computing