The correct title of this article is nCUBE. The initial letter is capitalized due to technical restrictions.

nCUBE had a series of parallel computing computers from the company of the same name. Early generations of the hardware used a custom microprocessor. With its final generations of servers, nCUBE no longer designed custom microprocessors for machines, but used server class chips manufactured by a third party in massively parallel hardware deployments, primarily for the purposes of on-demand video. Parallel computing is the simultaneous execution of the same task (split up and specially adapted) on multiple processors in order to obtain results faster. ... Microprocessors, including an Intel 80486DX2 and an Intel 80386 A microprocessor (sometimes abbreviated µP) is a digital electronic component with miniaturized transistors on a single semiconductor integrated circuit (IC). ...

Company history

nCUBE was founded in 1983 in Beaverton, Oregon by a group of Intel employees frustrated by Intel's reluctance to enter the parallel computing market (Intel finally entered the market in 1989). In December 1985, the first generation of nCUBE's hypercube machines were released. The second generation was launched in June 1989. The third generation was released in 1995. 1983 (MCMLXXXIII in Roman) is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Beaverton is a city located in Washington County, Oregon, seven miles west of Portland in the Tualatin River Valley. ... Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC, HKEx: 4335), founded in 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation, is a U.S.-based multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ... Parallel computing is the simultaneous execution of the same task (split up and specially adapted) on multiple processors in order to obtain results faster. ... 1989 (MCMLXXXIX in Roman) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... This article is about the year. ... 1995 (MCMXCV in Roman) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

In 1988, Larry Ellison invested heavily into nCUBE and became the company's majority share holder. The company's headquarters was relocated to Foster City, California to be closer to the Oracle Corporation. In the 1990s, nCUBE shifted its focus from the parallel computing market to the Video on demand (VOD) video server market. In 1994, Ronald Dilbeck became chief executive officer and set nCUBE on a fast track to an initial public offering. 1988 (MCMLXXXVIII in Roman) was a leap year starting on a Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Lawrence Joseph Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is the co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation, a major database software firm. ... Foster City is a planned city located in San Mateo County, California. ... Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL), one of the major companies developing database management systems, tools for database development, and enterprise resource planning software, customer relationship management software (CRM) and supply chain planning (SCM) software dates from 1977 and has offices in more than 145 countries around the world. ... Video on demand (VOD) systems are systems which allow users to select and watch video content over a network as part of an interactive television system. ... 1994 (MCMXCIV in Roman) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International year of the Family. ... A chief executive officer (CEO) or chief executive is the highest-ranking corporate officer or executive officer of a corporation, company, or agency. ... Fast track gives the President of the United States authority to negotiate trade agreements that cannot be amended by Congress, only voted on yes or no. ... In financial markets, an initial public offering (IPO) is the first sale of a companys common shares to public investors, any other issuance by the company being called a Secondary Market Offering. ...

In 1996, Ellison downsized nCUBE and Dilbeck departed. Ellison took over as acting CEO and redirected the company to become Oracle's network computer division. After the network computer diversion, nCUBE resumed development on video servers. nCUBE deployed its first VOD video server in Burj al-Arab hotel in Dubai. Downsizing is a euphemism referring to layoffs initiated by a company in order to cut labor costs by reducing the size of the company. ... The Burj al-Arab hotel, has quickly become an architectural icon of Dubai. ... The Burj al-Arab hotel has become an architectural icon of Dubai which is inspired from architecture of the Persian city of Yazd. ...

In 1999, nCUBE announced it was acquiring a seven year old Louisville, Colorado software company SkyConnect, Inc., developers of digital advertising and VOD software for cable television and partner in their Burj Al-Arab hotel deployment. The company was once again on IPO fast-track, only to halted again after the bursting of Dot-com bubble. In 2000, SeaChange International filed a suit against nCUBE, alleging its nCUBE's MediaCube-4 product infringed on a SeaChange patent. A jury upheld the validity of SeaChange's patent and awarded damages. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit subequently overturned the ruling June 29, 2005. 1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday, and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ... Louisville is a city located in Boulder County, Colorado. ... Coaxial cable is often used to transmit cable television into the house Cable television or Community Antenna Television (CATV) (often shortened to cable) is a system of providing television, FM radio programming and other services to consumers via radio frequency signals transmitted directly to people’s televisions through fixed optical... Dot-com (also dotcom or redundantly dot. ... This article is about the year 2000. ...

As fallout from the dot-com bubble bursting, the recession, and the lawsuit, in April 2001 nCUBE laid-off 17% of its work force and began closing offices (Foster City in 2002 and Louisville in 2003) to downsize and consolidate the company around the Beaverton manufacturing office. Also in 2001, after acquiring patents from Oracle's interactive television division, nCUBE filed a patent infringement suit against SeaChange claiming that their competitor's video server offering violated its VOD patent on delivery to set-top boxes. nCUBE won the law suit and was awarded over $2 million in damages. A recession is usually defined in macroeconomics as a fall of a countrys real Gross Domestic Product in two or more successive quarters of a year. ... 2001: A Space Odyssey. ... 2002 (MMII) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The term set-top box describes a device that connects to a television and some external source of signal, and turns the signal into content then displayed on the screen. ...

Also in 2002, Ellison stepped down from CEO and named Michael J. Pohl, who had been the company's president (and former CEO of SkyConnect) since 1999, as CEO.

In January 2005, nCUBE was acquired by C-COR for approximately $89.5 million.

Computer models

The first nCUBE machines to be released were the nCUBE 10 of late 1985. These were based on a set of custom chips, including a 32-bit ALU and a 64-bit IEEE 754 FPU with 128kB of RAM combined onto a board known as a module. Each module delivered 2 MIPS, 500 kiloflops (32-bit single precision), or 300 kiloflops (64-bit double precision), and ran the Vertex operating system. 32-bit is a term applied to processors, and computer architectures which manipulate the address and data in 32-bit chunks. ... ALU redirects here. ... The IEEE Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic (IEEE 754) is the most widely-used standard for floating-point computation, and is followed by many CPU and FPU implementations. ... A floating point unit (FPU) is a part of a CPU specially designed to carry out operations on floating point numbers. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Million instructions per second (MIPS) is a measure of a computers processor speed. ... For commercial failures, see list of commercial failures. ... In computing, single precision is a computer numbering format that occupies one storage locations in computer memory at address. ... In computing, double precision is a computer numbering format that occupies two storage locations in computer memory at address and address+1. ... Early computers lacked operating systems. ...

The name referred to the machines ability to build an order-ten hypercube, supporting 1024 CPU's in a single machine. Some of the modules would be used strictly for input/output, which included the nChannel storage-control card, frame buffers, and the InterSystem card that allowed nCUBEs to be attached to each other. At least one host board needed to be installed, acting as the terminal driver. It also could partition the machine into sub-cubes and allocate them separately to different users. In geometry, the tesseract, or hypercube, is a regular, convex polychoron with eight cubical cells. ... Input/output, or I/O, is the collection of interfaces that different functional units (sub-systems) of an information processing system use to communicate with each other, or to the signals (information) sent through those interfaces. ...

For the second series the naming was changed, and they created the single-chip nCUBE 2 processor. This was otherwise similar to the nCUBE 10's CPU, but run faster at 25 MHz to provide about 7 MIPS and 3.5 megaflops. This was later improved to 30MHz in the 2S model. RAM was increased as well, with 4 to 16 MB of RAM on a "single wide" 1" x 3.5" module, double that on the "double wide" module, and quadruple that on a double wide, double side module. The I/O cards generally had less RAM, with different backend interfaces to support SCSI, HIPPI, etc. SCSI stands for Small Computer System Interface, and is a standard interface and command set for transferring data between devices on both internal and external computer buses. ... HIPPI (HIgh Performance Parallel Interface) is a computer bus for the attachment of high speed storage devices to supercomputers. ...

Each nCUBE-2 CPU also included thirteen I/O channels running at 20 Mbit/s. One of these was dedicated to I/O duties, while the other twelve were used as the interconnect system between CPUs. Each channel used wormhole routing to forward messages along. The machines themselves were wired up as order-twelve hypercubes, allowing for up to 4096 CPU's in a single machine. Wormhole routing is a system of simple routing in computer networking based on known fixed links, typically with a short address. ...

Each module ran a 200kB microkernel called nCX, but the system now used a Sun Microsystems workstation as the front end and no longer needed the Host Controller. nCX included a parallel filesystem that could do 96-way striping for high performance. C and C++ languages are available, as is NQS, Linda, and Parasoft's Express. These were supported by an in-house compiler team. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Kernel (computer science). ... Sun Microsystems, 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... The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a standardized imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie for use on the Unix operating system. ... C++ (pronounced see plus plus, IPA: ) is a general-purpose computer programming language. ...

The largest nCUBE-2 system installed was at Sandia National Laboratory, a 1024-CPU system that reached 1.91 gigaflops in testing. It has been suggested that Sandia Base be merged into this article or section. ...

The nCUBE-3 CPU included several improvements, and moved to a 64-bit ALU. Among the other improvements was a process-shrink to 0.5u, allowing the speed to be increased to 50Mhz (with plans for 66 and 100MHz). The CPU was also superscalar and included 16kB instruction and data caches, and an MMU for virtual memory support. A superscalar CPU architecture implements a form of parallelism on a single chip, thereby allowing the system as a whole to run much faster than it would otherwise be able to at a given clock speed. ... Diagram of a CPU memory cache A CPU cache is a cache used by the central processing unit of a computer to reduce the average time to access memory. ... MMU, short for Memory Management Unit, is a class of computer hardware components responsible for handling memory accesses requested by the CPU. Among the functions of such devices are the translation of virtual addresses to physical addresses (i. ...

Additional I/O links were added, with two dedicated to I/O and sixteen for interconnects, allowing for up to 65,536 CPUs in the hypercube. The channels operated at 100 Mbit/s, due to use of 2 bit parallel instead of the serial lines previously The nCUBE3 also added fault-tolerant adaptive routing support, in addition to fixed routing, although in retrospect it's not entirely clear why.

A fully loaded nCUBE-3 machine could use up to 65k processors, for 3TIPS, and 6.5 teraflops. The maximum memory will be 65 Tb, with an network I/O capability of 24 TB/second. Thus, the processor is biased in terms of I/O, which is usually the limitation. The nChannel board provides 16 I/O channels, where each channel can support transfers at 20 Mbyte/s.

See also

• INMOS Transputer
• iWarp

The INMOS Transputer (often written in lower case as transputer) was a pioneering parallel computing microprocessor design of the 1980s from INMOS, a British semiconductor company based in Bristol. ... iWarp was an experimental multiprocessing supercomputer developed as a joint project by Intel and Carnegie Mellon University. ...

External links

General:

• nCUBE Corporation (description of their machines)
• nCUBE Corporation web site

History:

• nCUBE's 1997 layoff
• Court upholds SeaChange's law suit.
• nCUBE's 2001 layoff.
• nCube - SeaChange patent battle.
• nCUBE wins patent law suit.
• nCUBE acquires SkyConnect.
• Michael Pohl becomes CEO.
• C-COR finalizes nCUBE acquisition.