The ETA10 is a

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 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 (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, 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 f ...

, 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 ...

. 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 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. 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 for cooling the CMOS-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 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 i ...

, 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, 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). 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 ...

(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 ...

(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

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-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, 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

, 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) labo ...

. 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 elevati ...

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

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 circuits mounted on a 44-layer printed circuit board (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 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 tools (an application for schematic capture) from Mentor Graphics. 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 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 (took delivery of the first ETA10 system, serial number 1, on January 5, 1987) * Johnson Space Center *

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 mone ...

(contributed to ETA System V, the

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 Took delivery of an ETA10-P system in 1989
Academia Sinica
* Deutscher Wetterdienst 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 practical disciplines (includi ...

competition, SuperQuest: *

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 ...

Notes

References

External links

A description of computer systems at the Waalsdorp museum, including the ETA line

* ttp://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=30952 IEEE article about the ETA10 liquid-nitrogen-cooled supercomputer system
The ETA Saga
{{Authority control Vector supercomputers History of electronic engineering Control Data Corporation mainframe computers Proprietary operating systems Supercomputer operating systems Discontinued operating systems 64-bit computers