file eugene-miya.html - docenting about the high end computers


<P>
<BR><BR><BR>
To some extent, our museum is a collection of museums that
were closed because they could not justify the floor space
that they took up. The floor space was too valuable. 
So we have the former 
   <DD>Livermore Computer Museum
<BR>and we have the former
   <DD>Digital  Equipment Computer Museum
<P>

You are very fortunate to be in the only location in the
world that has almost every computer that Seymour Cray
has designed - minus about 2 or 3 machines.
<P>
<B>Cray 1</B>  
<P><TABLE ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=80% BORDER=1 CELLPADDING=10>
<TD><P>
	<B>Cray 1</B> - Serial 6 Circa about 1975 - $8 machine
	<BR>They made about a couple dozen of these machines.
	These are the famous seats. We must re-apolster
	some of these - they are getting a little flat.
	Go ahead, take a seat. 
<P>
	This is a one megaword machine - it is not byte
	addressable.  There were 64 bits per word, so
	it would be about an 8 megabye memory if you took
	the number of bits.
	There were about 6 different operating
	machines which ran on this.  Its freon cooled.
	It has a 12.5 nanosecond cycle time (80 megahertz).
<P>
	Any questions?
	<BR><DD>  [Q]	(very young voice) What did the machine do?
	<BR>[A] The first three applications of this machine were:
		<DD>1) trying to predict what the weather would do
		<DD>2) help to design the hydrogen bomb
		<DD>3) crack codes
	<BR>After that it branched out into other areas.
	For example, there was one here at AMES for a while
	to help design the airflow of wings, design cars,
	design the Macintosh, portable laptop cases, and 
	many other things that you can kind of immagine.
<P>
	<DD>  [Q]	Who used this?
	<BR>[A] Basicly this was used by the government like this
	one here at Livermore.  This one was actually at
	Livermore (about 45 miles away from here).
	<P>
	This machine was never located in American universities.
	There were three competing machines that were
	located at like Colorado State and Perdue - 
	made by the company that Cray Research came out of
	called Control Data and it turned out that in the
	early 1980s people decided that there was kind of a 
	crisis and people started to put these machines in
	universities - and the put out about 10 different
	machines of various kinds - and now there are
	only two of them left out there.
<P>
	<DD>  [Q]	What is the interface to this?
	<BR>[A] You will see a console device on the other side of the
 	room which is similar, but you connected a fast mini-computer
	and you moved data in and out using that kind of thing.
	Now depending on where you were, there were two schools
 	of thought:
	<OL>
	 <LI>The more enlightened school of thought, in my opinion,
		like the Atomic Energy Commission, you actually
		put a scientist on this thing and you interacted
		with the thing.
	  <LI>But the majority of the people, unfortuantely my
		management was included, believed in submitting
		punched cards and you did batch processing.
		So you had the machine for very brief periods
		of time.
	</OL>
	Let me tell you, this was a wonderful machine to run
	interactively, and I did it as often as I could.
</TABLE>

<P>
<B>ILLIAC IV</B>  
<P><TABLE ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=80% BORDER=1 CELLPADDING=10>
<TD><P>
This was supposed to be 256 processors 
- in fact there were only 64 (one quadrant).
What you see mostly there is was is called the Control Unit
(if you will, the brain). And behind this CRT and a bunch of
buttons is a Processor Unit on the ground, it says ILLIAC IV PEM.
which is Processon Element. There were 64 of those and they were
the parallel processing work horses.  They had a small amount
- a couple kilo-words - of memory and you had to fit all your
problems on that.
<P>
We also had these large fixed head disks.
<P>
This was kind of a difficult machine to program

<P>

</TABLE>


<B><H2>de-briefing Eugene Miya</H2></B>


My role with the museum is that I am the designated NASA
AMES Research Center technical laison to the Computer Museum History Center.
I officially get to spend 12.5 percent of my time helping
the museum out with buearuracy stuff and with technical stuff
like collecting.
<P>
Where did my knowledge come from?  Basicly I came from software.
If I flub up with things having to do with hardware, that is why.
I am not a hardware person per sey.
<P>
But I have been involved with many super computer kind of things.
<P>
There is nothing on this tape which can be construed as 
propriatary.  I have signed non-disclosure agreements with
a number of companies.  You will hear none of that on the tape.
<P>
What happened was that in the mid 1980s I was asked by the
government to do a survey of parallel processing so I have
basicly since that point in time monitored the work going on
in parallel processing and in supercomputing, and to a lesser
extent what is going on in general in computer technology.
<P>
There are lots of people interested in this, not only NASA but
the intelligence community and lots of other things of that type.