BBN Butterfly is a parallel supercomputer built by Bolt, Beranek and Newman in the 1980s. He received the name Butterfly (from English - “butterfly”) because of the used butterfly switch network connection topology between computer nodes. The number of processors in BBN Butterfly could reach 512.
Content
History
BBN Butterfly has been developed since 1977 with the money of the DARPA agency as a Voice Funnel device for transmitting digitized voice and video over the network. Butterfly computers were later used as routers on the Satellite Wideband Network — designed by DARPA. This network then became known as the Terrestrial Wideband Network . The butterfly switch network topology was shaped like a butterfly and was most effective when performing fast Fourier transforms while digitizing audio and video.
In August 1983, DARPA funded the conversion of BBN Butterfly, which at that time had only 10 processors, into a full-fledged computer as part of the Strategic Computer Initiative — the US state program for creating fifth-generation computers [1] . BBN proposed to create a prototype on 128 processors and evaluate how easily it scales for more processors. Work began in October 1983 and the first system of 128 nodes was ready in February 1985. At the same time, the production of 16-processor machines was put on stream. The first copies went in August 1984 to the University of Rochester and the University of California at Berkeley . By March 1986, 19 BBN Butterfly computers were installed, including two 128-processor machines (one of which was provided to the University of Rochester in May 1985) and two 64-processor machines [1] .
Promising DARPA for an even more powerful machine, BBN launched the Monarch project to develop a massively parallel supercomputer with 8000 RISC processors and the same butterfly switch network topology. The project failed; BBN used the Monarch project development in its commercial system TC-2000, and the Monarch project closed in 1989 [2] .
Most of the systems sold were equipped with 16 processors. It is not known a single instance that would be preserved in the museum to this day. It is believed that at least one system operates in an autonomous vehicle developed in DARPA.
Description
Each BBN Butterfly computer, which in the documentation was called a processor, consisted of several (up to 256) nodes. Each node was connected to the other butterfly switch switched network with a bandwidth of 32 Mbit / s.
The first generation of BBN Butterfly computers used Morotola MC68000 processors with a clock frequency of 8 MHz (these processors, by the way, were used in the first models of Apple Macintosh computers ), and later - in the BBN Butterfly Plus model - M68010 processors [3] . Each processor had its own local memory (from 1 to 4 MB maximum), which was connected to all other processors, which means that each CPU could access the memory of any other CPU in the system as its own, albeit with a higher delay (approximately 5: one). Despite the fact that, from the point of view of each processor, the access to memory was non-uniform, the machine worked with memory as with a total (up to 1 GB), that is, it was a symmetric (SMP- NUMA ) multiprocessor . According to Flynn's classification, the BBN Butterfly was an SM-MIMD machine.
The second and third generation BBN Butterfly - GP-1000 models [4] - used Motorola 68020 processors , supplemented by Motorola MC68882 co-processors for floating point operations and could have up to 256 processors. Later models, the TC-2000, used a Motorola MC88100 processor and scaled to 512 processors [5] .
The 30-processor Butterfly Plus was offered for $ 400,000 , and the 30-processor Butterfly GP-1000 for $ 500,000 for November 1987. The console computer for BBN Butterfly was the DEC VAX .
BBN Butterfly was running the first proprietary operating system, called Chrysalis, but since 1989, it began to use an operating system based on the Mach microkernel.
Especially for Butterfly, TotalView parallel debugger was developed, which survived the platform and was ported to many other parallel computers.
See also
- Strategic Defense Initiative - US military technology program in the field of creating an anti-missile system, in which computers of the fifth generation were to play a role
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 Roland, 2002 , p. 165-166.
- ↑ Roland, 2002 , p. 181.
- ↑ R. Rettberg, C. Wyman, D. Hunt, M. Hoffman, P. Carvey, B. Hyde, W. Clark, M. Kraley. Development of a Voice Funnel (Eng.) // System: Design Report: journal. - Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., 1979. - August ( no. 4098 ).
- Announced in November 1987
- ↑ Patrick R. Amestoy, Michel J. Daydé, Iain S. Duff, Pierre Morère. Linear Algebra Calculations virtual virtual memory computer (English) // Int Journal of High Speed Computing: journal. - 1992. - 9 October ( vol. 7 ). - P. 21–43 .
Literature
- Alex Roland with Philip Shiman. Strategic Computing - DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983-1993 : [ eng ] . - The MIT Press, 2002. - 456 p. - ISBN 0262182262 .
Links
- BBN at Index of Dead Supercomputer Projects (English) - the source from which information is collected for this article
- documentation for the Buttefly GP1000 computer (eng.) - on bitsavers.org
- University of Rochester Report on the Use of BBN Butterfly - September 1988 (Eng.)