ETA10 is a series of vector supercomputers developed and marketed by ETA Systems , an independent subsidiary of Control Data Corporation (CDC). ETA10 supercomputers were introduced to the market in 1986, and the first deliveries were made in early 1987. The system was the development of CDC Cyber 205 computers, which in turn originate from the CDC STAR-100 supercomputer, created in the early 1970s.
In April 1989, ETA Systems was incorporated into CDC and ceased to exist and the production of supercomputers. Many ETA10 customers have exchanged their computers for Cray Research products.
Content
- 1 History
- 2 Products
- 3 Software
- 4 Literature
- 5 notes
- 6 References
History
ETA Systems separated from CDC in 1983 with the goal of creating a 10 GFlops computer by 1986 and developing chips for supercomputers with a cycle time of less than 10 ns [1] .
Products
ETA's only product was the ETA-10 supercomputer. It was a modified version of the CDC Cyber-205 supercomputer and remained compatible with it. Like other devices from the Cyber series, the ETA-10 did not use vector registers and blocks (unlike Cray machines), but used pipelined operations to memory and high-throughput RAM. Up to 8 general-purpose processors with access to shared memory were used, and up to 16 input-output coprocessors. Each processor performed up to 4 operations on double precision numbers or up to 8 on single precision numbers .
Among 4 ETA-10 models, in two (ETA-10E and ETA-10G), to increase the speed, liquid cooling systems of logic circuits using liquid nitrogen were used . Due to such cryogenic cooling of the CMOS circuits, a cycle duration of approximately 7 nanoseconds was achieved (clock frequency of the order of 140 MHz). A complete ETA-10 system could thus achieve performance over 9.1 GFLOPS.
The cheaper option was air-cooled systems: a dual-processor ETA10-Q (19 ns) and ETA10-P ("Piper").
The ETA-30 model was planned at 30 Gflops.
The company supplied 7 systems with liquid nitrogen cooling and 27 systems with air cooling.
Software
We used our own ETA OS called EOS, a version of UNIX System V (Release 3) was available.
Literature
- Arthur Trew (Editor), Greg Wilson (Editor). Past, Present, Parallel: A Survey of Available Parallel Computer Systems . - Springer, 1991 .-- 392 p. - ISBN 9783540196648 . (English) - a book about super- and mini-supercomputers of the 90s of the XX century
- Charles J. Murray. The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer . - Wiley, 1997 .-- 232 p. - ISBN 9780471048855 . (English) - a book about ERA , CDC , ETA Systems, Cray Research
Notes
- ↑ Ellis Booker, CDC supercomputer swang song // Computerworld: Apr 24, 1989, p.4 (eng.)
Links
- The ETA Saga. How to (Mis-) Manage a Company According to Control Data Corp. April 17, 1990 (English) - notes by an employee of ETA Systems, who tells in detail about its history and the events that led to its closure