*** Please note, this page (and web site) are in early development.
Items are certainly not complete, and may be inaccurate.
Your information, comments, corrections, etc. are eagerly requested.
Click here to e-mail Ed.
Please include the URL under discussion. Thank you ***
ETA
| Manufacturer | ETA - a "spinoff" of Control Data Corporation
|
| Identification,ID | ETA-10
|
| Date of first manufacture | 1986
|
| Number produced | -
|
| Estimated price or cost | -
|
| location in museum | -
|
| donor | John von Neumann Center
|
Contents of this page:
Photo
|
ETA-10 including liquid nitrogen tank
ETA-10 in service rack
|
Placard
Architecture
Special features
|
Models/variations
From John Swensen
The "big" ETA-10 was cooled in liquid nitrogen (not pressurized, so no steam
problems), and I believe the nitrogen flow from the cryogenerator
(big refrigerator) to and from the cryostat was high enough that boiling
was not much of an issue. Niel [Lincoln]
can tell some pretty funny stories about
development in the labs, however, when some things did go wrong.
The big machines had from two to 8 processors. Each circular tank held
two processors, each with its own "toaster slot", filled with liquid N2
(the round cryostat without the processors or memory looked like a futuristic
toaster).
The Piper was an air-cooled version of the ETA-10, with either one or two
processors. The clock was relaxed from 7ns to about 16-18ns, depending
on the model. By the way, the reason for marketing the Pipers was to get the volume of
chips high enough to allow selecting the fastest parts for the LN2 machines,
while still providing a market for the slower parts and developing a user
base for the ETA-10 architecture (that was the theory, at least).
For a while, the Pipers were beating Cray-2s at LINPACK (until Cray started
doing better code scheduling and strip-mining of loops).
|
From John Swensen
|
CMOS is now the circuit family of choice, with switching speeds in the low
tens of picoseconds; both Intel and AMD have announced 1 GHz processors,
implemented entirely with CMOS. I'm not a circuits guy, but I think that
once the geometry got small enough, the gate capacitance of CMOS dropped
to the point where it got really fast. Cooling CMOS to LN2 temperatures
speeds it up by about a factor of 4, in theory; in practice, a speedup of
2 is achieved, once the realities of a reliable circuit family are taken
care of. I can't remember the voltages used then, but I think it was a bit
below 5V at the time.
Although much slower than ECL at the time, CMOS could be packed much denser
on a chip, saving lots of off-chip and on-chip delays so, for certain
types of designs, CMOS could run faster than ECL, overall.
By the way, the memory (both the local, fast memories, and the shared,
dynamic memories, were not cooled; they would run a bit faster in LN2, but
not enough faster to justify the cost of cooling them.
|
|
Historical Notes
Neil R. Lincoln ( nrl at windlogics. com ) 651-483-3560, Shoreview, MN 55126
sent some corrections to an e-mail
"I became the "Chief
Architect and project manager of the STAR-100 in 1972, and went on to be the
architect of the CYBER-203 and CYBER 20_machines. I was the creator of he
ETA-10 and was the founder, VP and board member of ETA."
"Trevor Pearcey "kind of" worked for Chuck Hawley at CDC who was head of the
department in the Advanced Design Laboratory which was responsible for the
STAR-100 CPU hardware. Peter D. Jones helped create the virtual memory system
for the STAR and then architected the "station" concept for the supporting
peripheral computers (software and hardware). Family responsibilities led to
his returning to Australia in 1972 about the time Jim Thornton retired from
CDC. Jim continued as a consultant to CDC helping with the entry into VLSI
technology. Later Jim, Peter Jones and Gary Christianson founded ZYCAD."
|
Richard Offerdahl, Richard @ offerdahl . com - 593 Lariat Circle, Incline Village, NV 89451 775-772-0467
objected to the last sentence above - he said (Jan 2007):
"Here are some facts: Jim Thornton was a Board of Directors member of Zycad. Zycad was founded by Richard Offerdahl, Nick VanBrunt
and Jeanne Mehlhoff. Jones was an early investor in Zycad, along with Thornton and 30 or so other investors. Christensen was
not associated with Zycad. I believe that Thornton and Christensen (and maybe Jones) founded an interconnect company (Network Systems)
to connect hardware from different manufacturers together.
"
|
|
|
"ETA was a spin-off company of Control Data Corporation. Its ETA-10
supercomputer, introduced in 1986, proved popular with universities and
research institutions. Using a 44-layer PCB, the entire CPU was
constructed on a single board. This family of machines (spanning a 27:1
performance range) offered peak performance of up to 10 GFLOPS, used CMOS
logic, and came in air and liquid-nitrogen cooled versions."
http://wotug.ukc.ac.uk/parallel/documents/misc/timeline/timeline.txt
========1983========
ETA Systems, Inc. spun off from CDC to develop a new generation of
vector supercomputers. (GVW: CDC, ETA)
========1987========
ETA produces first air- and liquid nitrogen-cooled versions of ETA-10
multiprocessor supercomputer. (GVW: ETA)
ETA 10 with 1 processor achieves 52 MFLOPS on 100^2 LINPACK; NEC SX-2
with 1 processor achieves 885 MFLOPS (against a peak of 1300) on
1000^2 LINPACK. (JD: Linpack Benchmark, ETA 10, NEC SX-2)
========1989========
Control Data shuts down ETA Systems in April; National Science
Foundation subsequently shuts down the John von Neumann Supercomputer
Center at Princeton, which was operating an ETA-10. (MW: CDC, ETA)
========1990========
The two ETA-10 systems at the closed John von Neumann Supercomputer
Center are destroyed with sledge hammers, in order to render them
useless, after no buyers are found. (MW: ETA)
Life ain't fair department
from http://www.tjhsst.edu/TechLabs/CS/Systems/Piper.html
|
Piper : the ETA 10-P Supercomputer
Piper is an ETA 10-P vector supercomputer
with 64 MB of RAM and 2 GB of disk space. It
is running ETA System V Unix. At the current
time however, it is not working as a leak in the
roof has put it out of commission. It appears
that the problem is a corrupted fiber optic link
between the disk storage and the processor,
but we can't fix it ourselves.
Don Hyatt (dhyatt@tjhsst.edu) is the administrator for piper.
|
and software problems
from The Scientist 3[23]:2, Nov. 27, 1989
http://www.the-scientist.com/yr1989/nov/anderson_p2_891127.html
Without NSF funding, the von Neumann center could be doomed.
"I don’t think we can function without federal
support," says Cohen. Even if the center does operate at a vastly
reduced level, its machines continue to be plagued
by software problems. The NSF review panel found that the ETA-10
suffered a software failure once every 30 hours,
and that its ability to run programs on more than one of its
eight processors at any one time was poor. Although its
hardware is still considered state-of-the-art, the overall
package is an "extremely immature computer system," the
panel concluded.
|
This Artifact
Interesting Web Sites
Other information
If you have comments or suggestions, Send e-mail
to Ed Thelen
Go to Antique Computer home page
Go to Visual Storage page
Go to top
Updated Jan, 2007
