Floating Point Systems, Inc. (FPS), was a

Beaverton, Oregon Beaverton is a city in Washington County, in the U.S. state of Oregon with a small portion bordering Portland in the Tualatin Valley. The city is among the main cities that make up the Portland metropolitan area. Its population was 97,494 at the ...

vendor of attached

array 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 called ' ...

s and

minisupercomputer Minisupercomputers constituted a short-lived class of computers that emerged in the mid-1980s, characterized by the combination of vector processing and small-scale multiprocessing. As scientific computing using vector processors became more popul ...

s. The company was founded in 1970 by former

Tektronix Tektronix, Inc., historically widely known as Tek, is an American company best known for manufacturing test and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. Originally an independent ...

engineer

Norm Winningstad C. Norman (Norm) Winningstad (November 5, 1925 – November 24, 2010) was an American engineer and businessman in the state of Oregon. A native of California, he served in the U.S. Navy during World War II before working at what is now Lawrence B ...

, with partners Tom Prince, Frank Bouton and Robert Carter. Carter was a salesman for

Data General Data General Corporation was one of the first minicomputer firms of the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Their first product, 1969's Data General Nova, was a 16-bit minicomputer ...

Corp. who persuaded Bouton and Prince to leave Tektronix to start the new company. Winningstad was the fourth partner.

History

The original goal of the company was to supply economical, but high-performance,

floating point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can be ...

coprocessor A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor (the CPU). Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating-point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, cryptography o ...

s for

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ...

s. In 1976, the '' AP-120B''

was produced. This was soon followed by a unit for larger systems and IBM mainframes, the FPS AP-190. In 1981, the follow-on ''FPS-164'' was produced, followed by the FPS-264, which had the same architecture. This was five times faster, using ECL instead of

TTL TTL may refer to: Photography * Through-the-lens metering, a camera feature * Zenit TTL, an SLR film camera named for its TTL metering capability Technology * Time to live, a computer data lifespan-limiting mechanism * Transistor–transistor lo ...

chips. These processors were widely used as attached processors for scientific applications in

reflection seismology Reflection seismology (or seismic reflection) is a method of exploration geophysics that uses the principles of seismology to estimate the properties of the Earth's subsurface from reflected seismic waves. The method requires a controlled seismi ...

physical chemistry Physical chemistry is the study of macroscopic and microscopic phenomena in chemical systems in terms of the principles, practices, and concepts of physics such as motion, energy, force, time, thermodynamics, quantum chemistry, statistical mecha ...

NSA The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collectio ...

cryptology Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adve ...

and other disciplines requiring large numbers of computations. Attached array processors were usually used in facilities where larger

supercomputers 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 p ...

were either not needed or not affordable. Hundreds if not thousands of FPS boxes were delivered and highly regarded. FPS's primary competition up to this time was IBM (3838 array processor) and CSP Inc.

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

, led by physicist

Kenneth G. Wilson Kenneth Geddes "Ken" Wilson (June 8, 1936 – June 15, 2013) was an American theoretical physicist and a pioneer in leveraging computers for studying particle physics. He was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on phase ...

, made a supercomputer proposal to NSF with IBM to produce a processor array of FPS boxes attached to an IBM mainframe with the name ''lCAP''.

Parallel processing

In 1986, the ''T-Series''

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, ...

computers using INMOS

transputer The transputer is a series of pioneering microprocessors from the 1980s, intended for parallel computing. To support this, each transputer had its own integrated memory and serial communication links to exchange data with other transputers. T ...

s and

Weitek Weitek Corporation was an American chip-design company that originally focused on floating-point units for a number of commercial CPU designs. During the early to mid-1980s, Weitek designs could be found powering a number of high-end designs a ...

floating-point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can b ...

processors was introduced. The T stood for "

Tesseract In geometry, a tesseract is the four-dimensional analogue of the cube; the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square. Just as the surface of the cube consists of six square faces, the hypersurface of the tesseract consists of eig ...

". Unfortunately, parallel processing was still in its infancy and the software tools and libraries for the T-Series didn't facilitate customers' parallel programming. I/O was also difficult, so the T-Series was discontinued, a mistake costing tens of millions of dollars that was nearly fatal to FPS. A few dozen T-series were delivered.

Celerity acquisition; acquisition by Cray

In 1988, FPS acquired the assets of

Celerity Computing Celerity Computing Inc. was a San Diego, California vendor of Unix-based "supermini" computers. Celerity Computing was founded in May 1983 by Steve Vallender, Nick Aneshansley and Andrew McCroklin. Celerity shipped its first product, the C1200 P ...

San Diego, California San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United States ...

, renaming itself as FPS Computing. Celerity's product lines were further developed by FPS, the

Celerity 6000 Celerity (Latin ''celeritas'') may refer to: * Speed, quickness * Speed of light, ''celeritas'' * Celerity BBS, a computer bulletin board system popular in the 1990s * Celerity Computing Inc., defunct San Diego, California vendor * Celerity IT, a ...

being developed into the ''FPS Model 500'' series. FPS was acquired by

Cray 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 ...

in 1991 for $3.25 million, and their products became the '' S-MP'' and ''APP'' product lines of

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 ...

. The S-MP was a

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system developed ...

-based

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 ...

server (based on the Model 500); the MCP a matrix co-processor array based on eighty-four

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 ...

processors. After Cray purchased FPS, it changed the group's direction by making them ''Cray Research Superservers, Inc.'', later becoming the Cray Business Systems Division (Cray BSD). The MCP was renamed the

Cray APP The Cray APP (''Attached Parallel Processor'') was a parallel computer sold by Cray Research from 1992 onwards. It was based on the Intel i860 microprocessor and could be configured with up to 84 processors. The design was based on "computational no ...

. The S-MP architecture was not developed further. Instead, it was replaced by the ''

Cray Superserver 6400 The Cray Superserver 6400, or CS6400, is a discontinued multiprocessor server computer system produced by Cray Research Superservers, Inc., a subsidiary of Cray Research, and launched in 1993. The CS6400 was also sold as the Amdahl SPARCsummit 640 ...

'', (CS6400), which was derived indirectly from a collaboration between

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

and

Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...

Acquisition by SGI and Sun

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 soft ...

acquired Cray Research in 1996, and shortly afterward the Cray BSD business unit along with the CS6400 product line was sold to Sun Microsystems for an undisclosed amount (acknowledged later by a Sun executive to be "significantly less than $100 million"). Sun was then able to bring to market the follow-on to the CS6400 which Cray BSD was developing at the time, codenamed ''Starfire'', launching it as the Ultra Enterprise 10000

server. This system was followed by the Sun Fire 15K and Sun Fire 25K. These systems allowed Sun to become a first tier vendor in the large server market. In January 2010, Sun was acquired by Oracle Corporation.

References

External links

1986 news about FPS
- ''Daily Journal of Commerce''

* Howard Thrailkil
FPS Computing: A History of Firsts
*

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 ...