The Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer (ECS) was a large

Meiko Computing Surface Meiko Scientific Ltd. was a British supercomputer company based in Bristol, founded by members of the design team working on the Inmos transputer microprocessor. History In 1985, when Inmos management suggested the release of the transputer be ...

supercomputer. This

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 ...

-based,

massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of t ...

system was installed at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

History

Following a pilot project involving an early 40-transputer Computing Surface installed in April 1986, funding was obtained from SERC and the DTI for a much larger system using T800 transputers and a

MicroVAX The MicroVAX is a discontinued family of low-cost minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The first model, the MicroVAX I, was introduced in 1983.(announced October 1983) They used processors that implemen ...

fileserver In computing, a file server (or fileserver) is a computer attached to a network that provides a location for shared disk access, i.e. storage of computer files (such as text, image, sound, video) that can be accessed by the workstations that are ab ...

. The Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer Project (ECSP) was formed to manage and support the facility, which was commissioned at the end of 1987. Over the next few years, the system received several upgrades, including more transputers (reaching, at its peak, around 400 processors) and the installation of M²VCS and

MeikOS Meiko Scientific Ltd. was a British supercomputer company based in Bristol, founded by members of the design team working on the Inmos transputer microprocessor. History In 1985, when Inmos management suggested the release of the transputer b ...

system software, which enabled

multi-user Multi-user software is computer software that allows access by multiple users of a computer. Time-sharing systems are multi-user systems. Most batch processing systems for mainframe computers may also be considered "multi-user", to avoid leaving t ...

access and removed the need for the MicroVAX. In 1990, the Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer Project was succeeded by the

Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre EPCC, formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, is a supercomputing centre based at the University of Edinburgh. Since its foundation in 1990, its stated mission has been to ''accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing t ...

, which consolidated the project with other parallel computing resources and activities within the University. The ECS continued to be used for a variety of academic and commercial research work. In October 1992 the ECS was reconfigured as 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 develope ...

-hosted Computing Surface with three SPARC "host" processors running SunOS and around 380 T800s. The system was finally decommissioned in August 1994.

References

* Wallace, D J. "Supercomputing with Transputers", ''Computing Systems in Engineering'', Volume 1, Issue 1, 1990, Pages 131-141, , Pergamon Press, Inc. Elmsford, NY, USA
Brown, Mike. "The Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer: an appreciation", ''EPCC News'', No.24, 1994.

External links

EPCC History page
{{super-compu-stub Supercomputers University of Edinburgh School of Informatics