vector
Vector most often refers to:
*Euclidean vector, a quantity with a magnitude and a direction
*Vector (epidemiology), an agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism
Vector may also refer to:
Mathematic ...
supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...
designed, manufactured, and marketed by
ETA Systems
Eta (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἦτα ''ē̂ta'' or ell, ήτα ''ita'' ) is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the close front unrounded vowel . Originally denoting the voiceless glottal fricative in most dialects, ...
, a spin-off division of
Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer firm. CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywel ...
(CDC). The ETA10 was an evolution of the CDC Cyber 205, which can trace its origins back to the CDC STAR-100, one of the first vector supercomputers to be developed.
CDC announced it was creating ETA Systems, and a successor to the Cyber 205, on 18 April 1983 at the Frontiers of Supercomputing conference, held at the
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...
. It was then referred to tentatively as the Cyber 2XX, and later as the GF-10, before it was named the ETA10. Prototypes were operational in mid-1986, and the first delivery was made in December 1986. The supercomputer was formally announced in April 1987 at an event held at its first customer installation, the
Florida State University
Florida State University (FSU) is a public research university in Tallahassee, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida. Founded in 1851, it is located on the oldest continuous site of higher education in the st ...
, Tallahassee's Scientific Computational Research Institute. On 17 April 1989, CDC abruptly closed ETA Systems due to ongoing financial losses, and discontinued production of the ETA10. Many of its users, such as Florida State University, negotiated Cray hardware in exchange.
Historical development
CDC had a strong history of creating powerful supercomputers, starting with the
CDC 6600
The CDC 6600 was the flagship of the 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the IBM ...
. One of the most famous computer architects to emerge from CDC was
Seymour Cray
Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996 ) was an American
CDC 8600
The CDC 8600 was the last of Seymour Cray's supercomputer designs while he worked for Control Data Corporation. As the natural successor to the CDC 6600 and CDC 7600, the 8600 was intended to be about 10 times as fast as the 7600, already the fast ...
, he went on to form his own supercomputer company,
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 i ...
. Meanwhile, work continued at CDC in developing a high-end supercomputer, the CDC STAR-100—led by another famous architect, Neil Lincoln. Cray Research's
Cray-1
The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Cray Research. Announced in 1975, the first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. Eventually, over 100 Cray-1s were sold, making it one of the ...
vector supercomputer was successful, beating CDC's STAR-100. CDC responded with derivatives of the STAR, the Cyber 203 and 205. The Cyber 205 was moderately successful against the Cray-1's successor, the
Cray X-MP
The Cray X-MP was a supercomputer designed, built and sold by Cray Research. It was announced in 1982 as the "cleaned up" successor to the 1975 Cray-1, and was the world's fastest computer from 1983 to 1985 with a quad-processor system performance ...
. It became apparent to CDC's top management that it needed to decrease the development time for the next generation computer—thus a new approach was considered for the follow-on to the Cyber 205.
After spinning off from CDC in September 1983, ETA set a goal of producing a supercomputer with a cycle time less than 10ns. To accomplish this, several innovations were made. Among these was the use of
liquid nitrogen
Liquid nitrogen—LN2—is nitrogen in a liquid state at low temperature. Liquid nitrogen has a boiling point of about . It is produced industrially by fractional distillation of liquid air. It is a colorless, low viscosity liquid that is wide ...
for cooling the
CMOS
Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss", ) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSFE ...
-based CPUs.
The ETA10 successfully met the company's initial goals (10
GFLOPS
In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...
), with some models achieving a cycle time of about 7 ns (143 MHz) - considered rapid by mid-1980s standards. They delivered seven liquid nitrogen-cooled versions and 27 smaller, air-cooled versions. The
CMOS
Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss", ) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSFE ...
circuits produced only a fraction of the heat of previous ICs. The planned 1987 follow-on was supposed to be designated Cyber 250 or ETA30, as in 30 GFLOPS. ETA was eventually reincorporated back into CDC, ceasing operations on April 17, 1989.
Operating systems and applications
The ETA10 series could run either ETA's
EOS
In ancient Greek mythology and religion, Eos (; Ionic and Homeric Greek ''Ēṓs'', Attic ''Héōs'', "dawn", or ; Aeolic ''Aúōs'', Doric ''Āṓs'') is the goddess and personification of the dawn, who rose each morning from her home at ...
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...
, which was widely criticized for various problems, or a port by Lachman Associates, a software personnel firm, of
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, and ot ...
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). While EOS suffered a reputation for poor quality, ETA's UNIX was better received by customers.
EOS was preceded by and was binary executable compatible with the CDC VSOS operating system for Cyber 205. Like VSOS, EOS had demand paged
virtual memory
In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a very l ...
(the VS part) with 2 pages sizes for improved virtual memory performance with the ETA's faster hardware pipelines. Though it had roots in the interactive
Livermore Time Sharing System
The Livermore Time Sharing System (LTSS) was a supercomputer operating system originally developed by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories for the Control Data Corporation 6600 and 7600 series of supercomputers.
LTSS resulted in the Cray Time S ...
(LTSS), VSOS was focused as a
batch-oriented
Computerized batch processing is a method of running software programs called jobs in batches automatically. While users are required to submit the jobs, no other interaction by the user is required to process the batch. Batches may automatically ...
operating system. VSOS was not run at very many institutions and its application-oriented performance, while the historic focus for supercomputing, set its features behind the times because of its limited user base.
To address this feature deficiency and to make the operating system more "normal to use", the VSOS characteristics were married with
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, and ot ...
characteristics in a hybrid OS. The OS was intended to be effective for both batch work that drove the hardware to its maximum or for interactive use in development from a UNIX workstation.
EOS was written mainly in Cybil, a
Pascal
Pascal, Pascal's or PASCAL may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Pascal (given name), including a list of people with the name
* Pascal (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name
** Blaise Pascal, Fren ...
-like
programming language
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language.
The description of a programming ...
created by Control Data for its later Cyber operating systems. It was a new effort, as VSOS was implemented in
IMPL
In processor design, microcode (μcode) is a technique that interposes a layer of computer organization between the central processing unit (CPU) hardware and the programmer-visible instruction set architecture of a computer. Microcode is a la ...
, a Fortran-like language created for the LTSS implementation. The
command line
A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...
appearance of all these systems was similar to the lineage going back to
UNIVAC
UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company an ...
EXEC*8
OS 2200 is the operating system for the Unisys ClearPath Dorado family of mainframe systems. The operating system kernel of OS 2200 is a lineal descendant of Exec 8 for the UNIVAC 1108.
Documentation and other information on current and past Un ...
.
EOS was released with early hardware deliveries and had some of the typical problems for early OS releases. Some customers delayed payment for their supercomputer installations.
ETA later released a port of UNIX for the ETA-10 line, which was more quickly accepted by their customer base. However, this port started as a single-processor kernel which did not transparently exploit the hardware architecture with up to 8 large application CPUs for applications.
Criticism
Despite eventual adoption of
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, and ot ...
, poorly developed system software remained one flaw of the ETA10 line. According to one description of the system:
:Without NSF funding, the von Neumann center could be doomed. "I don’t think we can function without federal support," says Cohen. Even if the center does operate at a vastly reduced level, its machines continue to be plagued by software problems. The NSF review panel found that the ETA10 suffered a software failure once every 30 hours, and that its ability to run programs on more than one of its eight processors at any one time was poor. Although its hardware is still considered state-of-the-art, the overall package is an "extremely immature computer system," the panel concluded.
The late delivery and operating problems contributed to this demise as well as management problems.
It is a mistake to believe that ETA's demise was based solely on operating system choice or existence. The Fortran compiler (ftn200) had not changed from the CDC205. This compiler retained vendor-specific programming performance features (known as the Q8* subroutine calls) in an era when supercomputer users were realizing the necessity of source code portability between architectures. Additionally, the compiler optimizations were not keeping up with existing technology as shown by the Japanese supercomputer vendors as well as the newer minisupercomputer makers and competition at Cray Research.
In general, computer hardware manufacturers prior and up to that period tended to be weak on software. Libraries and available commercial and non-commercial applications help build an installed user base. CDC was relatively weak in this area, and some of the best operating systems that CDC provided to customers were productized versions of an OS written by
Lawrence Livermore Laboratories
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...
.
According to NASA, the hardware was very poorly designed, and failed to complete any acceptance tests at the
Ames Research Center
The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...
. This one event is considered among CDC insiders to be the downfall of ETA, which folded as a result of NASA saying no (and in a domino effect DOD, etc.).
Models
There were four models of the ETA10. Any of these models could be built in either single- or multi-processor configurations.
The Models E and G were the highest-performing members of the ETA10 line, and used liquid nitrogen cooling to achieve rapid cycle times. The first to be announced was the Model E, whose processors had a 10.5 ns clock cycle (approximately 95 MHz). The Model E could support up to eight processors, for a peak performance of 8.32 GFLOPS. The later Model G, whose processors had a 7 ns clock cycle (approximately 142 MHz), had a peak performance of 10.3 GFLOPS in its maximal eight-processor configuration.
The Models P and Q were slower, less-costly, air-cooled versions. The Model P, codenamed "Piper", had processors with a 24 ns clock cycle. The faster, two-processor Model Q had a 19 ns clock cycle.
Performance
Between the highest-performing, liquid-nitrogen cooled models (ETA10-E, G, ''etc.'') and the cheaper, air-cooled models (ETA10-P, Q, ''etc.''), the ETA10 line spanned a 27:1 performance range. Peak performance on the top-of-the-line models reached 10 GFLOPS.
A single-processor ETA10 achieved 52 MFLOPS on the LINPACK
benchmark
Benchmark may refer to:
Business and economics
* Benchmarking, evaluating performance within organizations
* Benchmark price
* Benchmark (crude oil), oil-specific practices
Science and technology
* Benchmark (surveying), a point of known elevatio ...
for a matrix with a size of 100 × 100.
Description
The ETA10 was a
multiprocessor
Multiprocessing is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. There ar ...
system that supported up to eight CPUs. Each CPU was similar to that of a two-lane Cyber 205. One of the main innovations of the ETA10 was how the CPU was implemented: the CPU was made of 250
CMOS
Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss", ) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSFE ...
gate array
A gate array is an approach to the design and manufacture of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) using a prefabricated chip with components that are later interconnected into logic devices (e.g. NAND gates, flip-flops, etc.) according ...
integrated circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...
s mounted on a 44-layer
printed circuit board
A printed circuit board (PCB; also printed wiring board or PWB) is a medium used in Electrical engineering, electrical and electronic engineering to connect electronic components to one another in a controlled manner. It takes the form of a L ...
(PCB). Each gate array contained 20,000
gates
Gates is the plural of gate, a point of entry to a space which is enclosed by walls. It may also refer to:
People
* Gates (surname), various people with the last name
* Gates Brown (1939-2013), American Major League Baseball player
* Gates McFadde ...
and was fabricated using 1.25-
micrometre
The micrometre ( international spelling as used by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures; SI symbol: μm) or micrometer (American spelling), also commonly known as a micron, is a unit of length in the International System of Unit ...
(μm) technology that was accessible from the VHSIC program at Honeywell. In contrast, mainstream commercial technology at the time was in the 3 to 5 μm range.
CMOS circuitry, which was not typically used in vector supercomputer CPUs at the time, was chosen because of the high density achievable, which reduces both the on-chip and off-chip delay. The CPU delays were managed through careful tuning of each PCB manufactured in conjunction with the logic technology and incorporated two key technologies known as
JTAG
JTAG (named after the Joint Test Action Group which codified it) is an Technical standard, industry standard for verifying designs and testing printed circuit boards after manufacture.
JTAG implements standards for on-chip instrumentation in ele ...
and BIST. The gate arrays were designed using a combination of internally developed simulator and placement tools, and one of the first commercial
electronic design automation
Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing Electronics, electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards. The tools wo ...
tools (an application for schematic capture) from
Mentor Graphics
Siemens EDA is a US-based electronic design automation (EDA) multinational corporation for electrical engineering and electronics, headquartered in Wilsonville, Oregon. Founded in 1981 as Mentor Graphics, the company was acquired by Siemens in ...
. Prior to the use of schematic capture at ETA, designers used textual
netlist
In electronic design, a netlist is a description of the connectivity of an electronic circuit. In its simplest form, a netlist consists of a list of the electronic components in a circuit and a list of the nodes they are connected to. A network ...
s to describe the interconnection of the logic circuits.
However, CMOS circuitry at that time was significantly slower than that of bipolar circuitry, especially the
emitter-coupled logic
In electronics, emitter-coupled logic (ECL) is a high-speed integrated circuit bipolar transistor logic family. ECL uses an overdriven bipolar junction transistor (BJT) differential amplifier with single-ended input and limited emitter current to ...
that was widely used in vector supercomputer CPUs at the time. To compensate for this, the CPU was immersed in -196.15 °C
liquid nitrogen
Liquid nitrogen—LN2—is nitrogen in a liquid state at low temperature. Liquid nitrogen has a boiling point of about . It is produced industrially by fractional distillation of liquid air. It is a colorless, low viscosity liquid that is wide ...
for cooling. Although such cooling could potentially speed up the CMOS logic by a factor of four, in practice the liquid nitrogen cooling yielded an approximately twofold speed increase over air-cooled systems. However, because liquid nitrogen cooling yielded only marginal performance benefits, none of the ETA10 systems used such cooling for either the local or shared memories. It is of particular note that in order for this type of cooling to be effective, a closed-loop system was required. ETA had to innovate to make this possible, since there were not any commercially available solutions in the market. The 44-layer PCB was also innovative, and ETA had to develop new processes to manufacture it.
Each CPU had its own 4 million word local memory built from SRAM ICs. Each CPU is also connected to a 256 million word shared memory built from DRAM ICs. In addition to these memories, there is a ''communication buffer'' used for CPU synchronization and other multiprocessor-related protocol communication. I/O was facilitated by one to eighteen I/O processors that each have a direct path to the shared memory. The ETA10 used
fiber-optic
An optical fiber, or optical fibre in Commonwealth English, is a flexible, transparent fiber made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. Optical fibers are used most often as a means t ...
lines for communication between the CPUs and I/O devices, a novel approach for systems interconnection in the 1980s.
Installations
Before ETA Systems was reincorporated into CDC, a total of 25 systems were delivered. Among the recipients were:
*
Florida State University
Florida State University (FSU) is a public research university in Tallahassee, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida. Founded in 1851, it is located on the oldest continuous site of higher education in the st ...
(took delivery of the first ETA10 system, serial number 1, on January 5, 1987)
*
Johnson Space Center
The Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) is NASA's center for human spaceflight (originally named the Manned Spacecraft Center), where human spaceflight training, research, and flight control are conducted. It was renamed in honor of the late U ...
*
John von Neumann Center The John von Neumann Center (JVNC) was one of the five pioneering US supercomputer National Science Foundation Network#History, centers created by the National Science Foundation (NSF), established in 1985. The JVNC was the only national center to u ...
(JVNC), (when no buyers could be found for the two ETA10 machines at this center, they were destroyed with sledgehammers to prevent illicit use)
*
Purdue University
Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and money ...
(contributed to ETA System V, the
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 ...
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, and ot ...
variant that ran on the ETA10).
*
Tokyo Institute of Technology
is a national research university located in Greater Tokyo Area, Japan. Tokyo Tech is the largest institution for higher education in Japan dedicated to science and technology, one of first five Designated National University and selected as ...
Took delivery of an 8-CPU liquid-cooled system in 1988
*
Meiji University
, abbreviated as Meiji (明治) or Meidai (明大'')'', is a private research university located in Chiyoda City, the heart of Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1881 as Meiji Law School (明治法律学校, ''Meiji Hōritsu Gakkō'') by three Meiji-er ...
Took delivery of an ETA10-P system in 1989
Academia Sinica *
Deutscher Wetterdienst
The () or DWD for short, is the German Meteorological Service, based in Offenbach am Main, Germany, which monitors weather and meteorological conditions over Germany and provides weather services for the general public and for nautical, avia ...
By the end of the 1980s, the remaining ETA10 systems were donated to high schools through a
computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (also known as TJHSST, TJ, or Jefferson) is a Virginia state-chartered magnet high school in Fairfax County, Virginia operated by Fairfax County Public Schools.
The school occupies the buil ...
See also
*
EOS
In ancient Greek mythology and religion, Eos (; Ionic and Homeric Greek ''Ēṓs'', Attic ''Héōs'', "dawn", or ; Aeolic ''Aúōs'', Doric ''Āṓs'') is the goddess and personification of the dawn, who rose each morning from her home at ...
, the operating system ETA Systems developed in-house
*
Cray Time Sharing System
The Cray Time Sharing System, also known in the Cray user community as CTSS, was developed as an operating system for the Cray-1 or Cray X-MP line of supercomputers. CTSS was developed by the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL now LANL) in con ...
Timeline of operating systems
This article presents a timeline of events in the history of computer operating systems from 1951 to the current day. For a narrative explaining the overall developments, see the History of operating systems.
1950s
* 1951
** LEO I 'Lyons Electro ...