The Caltech Cosmic Cube was a
parallel computer
Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different fo ...
, developed by Charles Seitz and
Geoffrey C Fox from 1981 onward. It was the first working
hypercube built.
It was an early attempt to capitalise on
VLSI
Very large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when MOS integrated circuit (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) ...
to speed up scientific calculations at a reasonable cost. Using commodity hardware and an architecture suited to the specific task (
QCD
In theoretical physics, quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the theory of the strong interaction between quarks mediated by gluons. Quarks are fundamental particles that make up composite hadrons such as the proton, neutron and pion. QCD is a ty ...
), Fox and Seitz demonstrated that this was indeed possible.
In 1984 a group at
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
including
Justin Rattner and
Cleve Moler
Cleve Barry Moler is an American mathematician and computer programmer specializing in numerical analysis. In the mid to late 1970s, he was one of the authors of LINPACK and EISPACK, Fortran libraries for numerical computing. He invented MATL ...
developed the
Intel iPSC The Intel Personal SuperComputer (Intel iPSC) was a product line of parallel computers in the 1980s and 1990s.
The iPSC/1 was superseded by the Intel iPSC/2, and then the Intel iPSC/860.
iPSC/1
In 1984, Justin Rattner became manager of the Intel ...
inspired by the Cosmic Cube.
In 1987 several people in the group formed a company called
Parasoft
Parasoft (officially Parasoft Corporation) is an independent software vendor specializing in automated software testing and application security with headquarters in Monrovia, California. It was founded in 1987 by four graduates of the Californ ...
to commercialize the message passing interface developed for the Cosmic Cube.
Characteristics
* 64
Intel 8086/87 processors
Birth of the Hypercube
/ref>
* 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, 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