Encore Computer was an early pioneer in the

parallel computing 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 ...

market, based in

Marlborough, Massachusetts Marlborough is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 41,793 at the 2020 census. Marlborough became a prosperous industrial town in the 19th century and made the transition to high technology industry in the ...

. Although offering several system designs beginning in 1985, they were never as well known as other companies in this field such as

Pyramid Technology Pyramid Technology Corporation was a computer company that produced a number of RISC-based minicomputers at the upper end of the performance range. It was based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California They also became the second company to s ...

, Alliant, and the most similar systems

Sequent In mathematical logic, a sequent is a very general kind of conditional assertion. : A_1,\,\dots,A_m \,\vdash\, B_1,\,\dots,B_n. A sequent may have any number ''m'' of condition formulas ''Ai'' (called " antecedents") and any number ''n'' of asse ...

and FLEX. Encore was founded in 1983 by: Kenneth Fisher, former CEO of

Prime Computer Prime Computer, Inc. was a Natick, Massachusetts-based producer of minicomputers from 1972 until 1992. With the advent of PCs and the decline of the minicomputer industry, Prime was forced out of the market in the early 1990s, and by the end of ...

;

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 ...

, an engineering vice president from

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...

responsible for the development of the

VAX VAX (an acronym for Virtual Address eXtension) is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The V ...

; and, Henry Burkhardt III, co-founder of

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 ...

and

Kendall Square Research Kendall Square Research (KSR) was a supercomputer company headquartered originally in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1986, near Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was co-founded by Steven Frank and Henry Burkhardt I ...

. Their goal was to build

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 ...

machines from commodity processors; their first design, the Multimax, was released in September 1985. This was one of the first commercial designs to make use of

bus snooping Bus snooping or bus sniffing is a scheme by which a coherency controller (snooper) in a cache (a snoopy cache) monitors or snoops the bus transactions, and its goal is to maintain a cache coherency in distributed shared memory systems. A cache cont ...

, allowing many processors to share the same memory efficiently.

History

In 1988 Encore purchased the former Systems Engineering Laboratories (SEL) from

Nippon Mining was a Japanese petroleum company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Nippon Mining Holdings (now JXTG Nippon Mining & Metals). The petroleum products of Japan Energy Corporation were sold by filling stations under the brand name JOMO (for "joy of mo ...

. SEL, founded in 1961, built high-performance electronics systems for industrial monitoring and control purposes, and was purchased by

Gould Electronics Gould Electronics Inc. was a manufacturer of electronics and batteries that branched into other fields before being partially absorbed in 1988 by Nippon Mining (now JX Holdings) and closed by them in 2014. History Gould was founded in 1928 a ...

in 1980; Gould was in turn purchased by Nippon Mining in 1988. SEL computers were used in many military flight simulators; because of US government regulations which forbid foreign companies from owning control of companies providing key components of the national defense, Nippon had to sell SEL. Nippon in essence paid Encore to buy the computer division. Encore then turned, as did most of the market, to

RISC In computer engineering, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a complex instruction set comput ...

-based CPUs. They chose the

Motorola 88000 The 88000 (m88k for short) is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Motorola during the 1980s. The MC88100 arrived on the market in 1988, some two years after the competing SPARC and MIPS. Due to the late start and extensive delays re ...

, and released the Encore-91 in late 1991, supporting two (9102) or four (9104) CPUs running at 25 MHz. A bottom-up redesign for the new processor led to the Infinity 90 series, starting with the Infinity 90/ES in 1994. The ES supported between 2 and 2,045 Motorola

88110 The MC88110 was a microprocessor developed by Motorola that implemented the 88000 instruction set architecture (ISA). The MC88110 was a second-generation implementation of the 88000 ISA, succeeding the MC88100. It was designed for use in personal ...

CPUs running at 50 MHz. Several newer machines in the Infinity 90 series were released, but Encore again found its CPU supplier changing direction as Motorola dropped development of the 88000 series to concentrate on the

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

. Trying again, this time in the high-performance real-time market, Encore turned to the

Alpha 21064 The Alpha 21064 is a microprocessor developed and fabricated by Digital Equipment Corporation that implemented the Alpha (introduced as the Alpha AXP) instruction set architecture (ISA). It was introduced as the DECchip 21064 before it was renam ...

to create the Infinity R/T Model 300, which first shipped in late 1994. By this point the massively parallel market was being encroached on by machines made up of large numbers of commodity machines, and Encore released a single-CPU

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workstat ...

running

OSF/1 OSF/1 is a variant of the Unix operating system developed by the Open Software Foundation during the late 1980s and early 1990s. OSF/1 is one of the first operating systems to have used the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University, and ...

, the Series 90 RT 3000. It was intended to be used either standalone or as a node in a massively parallel machine. Encore also worked on a modified RISC design known as the RSX. This was intended to operate in two modes, one as a normal CPU node for clusters, and in a CONCEPT/32 compatibility mode, which emulated earlier custom hardware from the real-time side of the company. Encore continues to offer upgrade paths for their earlier systems, some of which date back to 1975. Parts of the computing side of the company were sold off over the years, with the last major spin-off being their Storage Products Group, sold to

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 ...

in 1997.

Acquisitions

Gores Technology Group

In 1998 Gores Technology Group acquired Encore, and renamed it "Encore Real-Time Computing." This left the company consisting primarily of their real-time group and the original SEL core, returning to this business niche.

Compro Computer Services

In 2002, Compro Computer Services acquired Encore Real-Time Computing, although most of the non-US offices still operate under the Encore name. Compro continues its support of SelBUS-based SEL, Gould, and Encore Real-Time Computing products, and offers an upgrade path with the Legacy Computer Replacement System (LCRS) hardware simulator. A sample Encore Multimax system donated from the

Naval Postgraduate School The Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) is a public graduate school operated by the United States Navy and located in Monterey, California. It offers master’s and doctoral degrees in more than 70 fields of study to the U.S. Armed Forces, DOD ci ...

is in storage at the

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact on ...

Specifications

The original Multimax could support from one to ten pairs of 10 MHz

National Semiconductor National Semiconductor was an American semiconductor manufacturer which specialized in analog devices and subsystems, formerly with headquarters in Santa Clara, California. The company produced power management integrated circuits, display drive ...

NS32032 The NS32000, sometimes known as the 32k, is a series of microprocessors produced by National Semiconductor. The first member of the family came to market in 1982, briefly known as the 16032 before becoming the 32016. It was the first 32-bit general ...

processors, a

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in 32-bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calculation ...

CISC design similar to that of the

Motorola 68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector ...

.Hydrabus CPU Specification Revision 2.0. Hydra Computer Systems, Inc. May 1984 Subsequent Multimax models supported NS32332 and NS32532 processors at higher clock rates. The last National-based Multimax was the model 500 offered in 1989. All models ran the user's choice of BSD or System V

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 ...

or Mach. All three operating systems were modified for parallel computing. However, soon after the 500's release, National stopped the development of the NS32032 design.

References

{{reflist

External links

Compro
Companies established in 1983 Defunct computer hardware companies Parallel computing Defunct computer companies of the United States