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ETA Systems was a supercomputer company spun-off from Control Data Corporation (CDC) in the early 1980s in order to regain a footing in the supercomputer business. They successfully delivered an excellent machine, the ETA-10, but lost money continually while doing so. CDC management eventually gave up and folded the company. ETA Systems logo This is a copyrighted and/or trademarked logo. ...
ETA Systems logo This is a copyrighted and/or trademarked logo. ...
A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction. ...
Control Data Corporation, or CDC, was one of the pioneering supercomputer firms. ...
An ETA-10 supercomputer installation The ETA-10 was a line of supercomputers manufactured by ETA Systems (a spin-off division of CDC) in the 1980s and which implemented the instruction set of the CDC Cyber 205. ...
Historical development
Seymour Cray left CDC in the early 1970s when they refused to continue funding of his CDC 8600 project. Instead they continued with the CDC STAR-100 while Cray went off to build the Cray-1. Cray's machine was much faster than the STAR, and soon CDC found itself pushed out of the supercomputing market. Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 - October 5, 1996) was a supercomputer architect who founded the company Cray Research. ...
The CDC 8600 was the last of Seymore Crays supercomputer designs while working for Control Data. ...
The STAR-100 was a supercomputer from Control Data Corporation, one of the first machines to use a vector processor for improved math performance. ...
CRAY-1 at the EPFL in Switzerland. ...
William Norris was convinced the only way to regain a foothold would be to spin off a division that would be free from management proding. In order to regain some of the small-team flexibility that seemed essential to progress in the field, ETA was created in 1983 with the mandate to build a 10GFLOPS machine by 1986. For other people named William Norris see William Norris (disambiguation). ...
Products ETA had only one product, the ETA-10. It was essentially a modernized version of the CDC Cyber-205 computer, and deliberately kept compatible with it. Like the Cyber series, the ETA-10 did not use vector registers as in the Cray machines, but instead used pipelined memory operations to a high-bandwidth main memory. The basic layout was a shared-memory multiprocessor with up to 8 CPUs (and up to 16 I/O processors), each capable of 4 double-precision or 8 single-precision operations per clock cycle. The Cyber range of mainframe computers were Control Data Corporations primary products during the 1970s and 1980s. ...
A vector processor, or array processor, is a CPU design that is able to run mathematical operations on a large number of data elements very quickly. ...
Cray-2 supercomputer Cray Inc. ...
Primary storage is a category of computer storage, often called main memory. ...
This CPU uses numerous pins to connect to the motherboard. ...
A channel controller is a simple CPU used to handle the task of moving data to and from the memory of a computer. ...
The main reason for the ETA-10's speed was the use of a liquid nitrogen cooling in some models to cool the logic components. Even though it was based on then-current CMOS technologies, the cooling allowed the CPU's to operate on a ~7ns cycle, so a fully-loaded ETA-10 was capable of about 4.5 GFLOPS. The design goal had been 10 GFLOPS, so the design was technically a failure. Two LN2-cooled models were designated ETA-10F and ETA-10G. Two slower, lower-cost air-cooled versions, the ETA-10Q and ETA-10P (code named "Piper") were also marketed. General Name, Symbol, Number Nitrogen, N, 7 Chemical series nonmetals Group, Period, Block 15 (VA), 2 , p Density 1. ...
CMOS (pronounced see-moss), which stands for complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor, is a major class of integrated circuits. ...
Software Software for the ETA-10 line was largely regarded as a disaster. When they initially shipped in 1986 there was no operating system for the machines. Programs had to be loaded one at a time from an attached Apollo Computers workstation, run, and then the supercomputer rebooted to run the next program. At the time UNIX was making major inroads into the supercomputing fields, but ETA decided to write their own EOS operating system, which wasn't ready when the first machines were delivered. An operating system based on UNIX System V became available in 1988, at which point it looked like the machine might finally succeed. Many sites that had refused to pay for their machines due to the low quality of EOS found ETA's UNIX completely usable and were willing to accept delivery. In computing, an operating system (OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations. ...
Apollo Computer, Inc. ...
A computer workstation, often colloquially referred to as workstation, is a high-end general-purpose microcomputer designed to be used by one person at a time and which offers higher performance than normally found in a personal computer, especially with respect to graphics, processing power and the ability to carry...
Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...
Eos, by Evelyn de Morgan (1850 - 1919), 1895 (Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC): for a Pre-Raphaelite painter, Eos was still the classical pagan equivalent of an angel Eos (dawn) was, in Greek mythology, the Titan Goddess of the dawn, who rose from her home at the edge of...
AT&T UNIX System V was one of the versions of the UNIX operating system. ...
1988 is a leap year starting on a Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
In April 1989 CDC decided to fold ETA back into CDC, by which point 7 liquid-cooled and 27 air-cooled machines had been sold. At this point ETA had the best price/performance ratio of any supercomputer on the market, and its initial software problems appeared to be finally sorted out. Nevertheless, shortly thereafter CDC exited the supercomputer market entirely, giving away remaining ETA machines free to high schools through the SuperQuest computer science competition. In economics and engineering, the price/performance ratio refers to a products ability to deliver performance, of any sort, for its price. ...
SuperQuest is a national computational competition for high school students. ...
Wikibooks Wikiversity has more about this subject: School of Computer Science Open Directory Project: Computer Science Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies Belief that title science in computer science is inappropriate Categories: Computer science ...
Related articles Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (often abbreviated TJHSST) is a public magnet school in Fairfax County, Virginia, with specialization in the fields of science and mathematics, and which enrolls students from several localities within the Northern Virginia area. ...
Eos, by Evelyn de Morgan (1850 - 1919), 1895 (Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC): for a Pre-Raphaelite painter, Eos was still the classical pagan equivalent of an angel Eos (dawn) was, in Greek mythology, the Titan Goddess of the dawn, who rose from her home at the edge of...
In computing, an operating system (OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations. ...
Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...
External links - Computer history TNO location The Hague/Waalsdorp: the ETA10-P
- The ETA Saga
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