ETA10
Encyclopedia
The ETA10 was a line of vector
supercomputer
s designed, manufactured, and marketed by ETA Systems
, a spin-off division of Control Data Corporation
(CDC). The ETA10 was announced in 1986, with the first deliveries made in early 1987. The system was an evolution of the CDC Cyber 205, which can trace its origins back to the CDC STAR-100
.
. While he went on to form his own company, Cray Research, work continued at CDC in developing high-end mainframe computers (supercomputer
s)—led by another famous architect, Neil Lincoln. As Cray competed against CDC, it became apparent to top management that it needed to decrease the development time for the next generation computer—thus a new approach was considered for the follow-on to the Cyber 205.
After spinning off from CDC in September 1983, ETA set a goal of producing a supercomputer with a cycle time less than 10ns. To accomplish this, several innovations were made. Among these was the use of liquid nitrogen
for cooling the CMOS
-based CPUs.
The ETA10 successfully met the company's initial goals (10 GFLOPS), with some models achieving a cycle time of about 7 ns - considered rapid by mid-1980s standards. The planned 1987 follow-on was supposed to be designated Cyber 250 or ETA30, as in 30 GFLOPS. ETA was eventually reincorporated back into CDC, ceasing operations on April 17, 1989.
operating system
, which was widely criticized for various problems, or a port by Lachman Associates, a software personnel firm, of UNIX
System V (Release 3). While EOS suffered a reputation for poor quality, ETA's UNIX was better received by customers.
Use of the ETA10 was rather complicated, and required all programs be loaded via attached Apollo Computer
workstation
s. The program would then run once, and to run again would require re-loading from the Apollo. The ETA10 itself had no graphical console or local network interface, and all visualization of resulting data was performed by separate workstations after being retrieved from the Apollos. Programming for the ETA10 series could be done in FORTRAN
, C
, or assembly language
.
, poorly developed system software remained one flaw of the ETA10 line. According to one description of the system:
Anderson, Christopher (Nov. 27, 1989). NSF Supercomputer Program Looks Beyond Princeton Recall. The Scientist 3 (23), p. 2. (http://www.the-scientist.com/yr1989/nov/anderson_p2_891127.html).
It is a mistake to believe that ETA's demise was based solely on operating system choice or existence. The Fortran
compiler (ftn200) had not changed from the CDC205. This compiler retained vendor-specific programming performance features (known as the Q8* subroutine calls) in an era when supercomputer users were realizing the necessity of source code portability between architectures. Additionally, the compiler optimizations were not keeping up with existing technology as shown by the Japanese supercomputer vendors as well as the newer minisupercomputer makers and competition at Cray Research.
In general, computer hardware manufacturers prior and up to that period tended to be weak on software. Libraries and available commercial and non-commercial (soon to be called open-source) applications help an installed base of machine. CDC was relatively weak in this area. It is worth noting that some of the best operating systems that CDC provided to customers were productized versions of an OS written by Lawrence Livermore Laboratories.
According to NASA, the hardware was very poorly designed, and failed to complete any acceptance tests at AMES. See: A History of the ETA-10Q Acceptance Tests at NAS for a much less misleading discussion on criticism than seen above. This one event is considered amongst CDC insiders to be the downfall of ETA, which folded as a result of NASA saying no (and in a domino effect DOD, etc.).
Less-costly air-cooled versions were later offered, such as the two-processor ETA10-Q (19 ns clock cycle), and the ETA10-P, which was also called "Piper".
Any of the ETA10 models could be built in either single- or multi-processor configurations.
According to LINPACK
benchmark
, an ETA10 with a single processor achieved 52 MFLOPS on 100^2 LINPACK.
system that supported up to eight CPUs. Each CPU was similar to that of a two-lane Cyber 205. One of the main innovations of the ETA10 was how the CPU was implemented: the CPU was made of 250 CMOS
gate array
integrated circuit
s mounted on a 44-layer printed circuit board
(PCB). Each gate array contained 20,000 gates
and was fabricated using 1.25-micrometre
(μm) technology that was accessible from the VHSIC
program at Honeywell. In contrast, mainstream commercial technology at the time was in the 3 to 5 μm range.
CMOS circuitry, which was not typically used in vector supercomputer CPUs at the time, was chosen because of the high density achievable, which reduces both the on-chip and off-chip delay. The CPU delays were managed through careful tuning of each PCB manufactured in conjunction with the logic technology and incorporated two key technologies known as JTAG
and BIST
. The gate arrays were designed using a combination of internally developed simulator and placement tools, and one of the first commercial electronic design automation
tools (an application for schematic capture) from Mentor Graphics
. Prior to the use of schematic capture at ETA, designers used textual netlist
s to describe the interconnection of the logic circuits.
However, CMOS circuitry at that time was significantly slower than that of bipolar
circuitry, especially the emitter-coupled logic
that was widely used in vector supercomputer CPUs at the time. To compensate for this, the CPU was immersed in -196.15 °C liquid nitrogen
for cooling. Although such cooling could potentially speed up the CMOS logic by a factor of four, in practice the liquid nitrogen cooling yielded an approximately twofold speed increase over air-cooled systems. However, because liquid nitrogen cooling yielded only marginal performance benefits, none of the ETA10 systems used such cooling for either the local or shared memories. It is of particular note that in order for this type of cooling to be effective, a closed-loop system was required. ETA had to innovate to make this possible, since there were not any commercially available solutions in the market. The 44-layer PCB was also innovative, and ETA had to develop new processes to manufacture it.
Each CPU had its own 4 million word local memory built from SRAM ICs. Each CPU is also connected to a 256 million word shared memory built from DRAM ICs. In addition to these memories, there is a communication buffer used for CPU synchronization and other multiprocessor-related protocol communication. I/O was facilitated by one to eighteen I/O processors that each have a direct path to the shared memory. The ETA10 used fiber-optic lines for communication between the CPUs and I/O devices, a novel approach for systems interconnection in the 1980s.
By the end of the 1980s, the remaining ETA10 systems were donated to high schools through a computer science
competition, SuperQuest
:
Vector processor
A vector processor, or array processor, is a central processing unit that implements an instruction set containing instructions that operate on one-dimensional arrays of data called vectors. This is in contrast to a scalar processor, whose instructions operate on single data items...
supercomputer
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
s designed, manufactured, and marketed by ETA Systems
ETA Systems
ETA Systems was a supercomputer company spun off from Control Data Corporation 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...
, a spin-off division of Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....
(CDC). The ETA10 was announced in 1986, with the first deliveries made in early 1987. The system was an evolution of the CDC Cyber 205, which can trace its origins back to the CDC STAR-100
CDC STAR-100
The STAR-100 was a vector supercomputer designed, manufactured, and marketed by Control Data Corporation . It was one of the first machines to use a vector processor to improve performance on appropriate scientific applications....
.
Historical development
CDC had a strong history of creating powerful mainframe computers, with an emphasis on the scientific computing customer base. One of the most famous computer architects to emerge from CDC was Seymour CraySeymour Cray
Seymour Roger Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which would build many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing," Cray has been credited...
. While he went on to form his own company, Cray Research, work continued at CDC in developing high-end mainframe computers (supercomputer
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
s)—led by another famous architect, Neil Lincoln. As Cray competed against CDC, it became apparent to top management that it needed to decrease the development time for the next generation computer—thus a new approach was considered for the follow-on to the Cyber 205.
After spinning off from CDC in September 1983, ETA set a goal of producing a supercomputer with a cycle time less than 10ns. To accomplish this, several innovations were made. Among these was the use of liquid nitrogen
Liquid nitrogen
Liquid nitrogen is nitrogen in a liquid state at a very low temperature. It is produced industrially by fractional distillation of liquid air. Liquid nitrogen is a colourless clear liquid with density of 0.807 g/mL at its boiling point and a dielectric constant of 1.4...
for cooling the CMOS
CMOS
Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor is a technology for constructing integrated circuits. CMOS technology is used in microprocessors, microcontrollers, static RAM, and other digital logic circuits...
-based CPUs.
The ETA10 successfully met the company's initial goals (10 GFLOPS), with some models achieving a cycle time of about 7 ns - considered rapid by mid-1980s standards. The planned 1987 follow-on was supposed to be designated Cyber 250 or ETA30, as in 30 GFLOPS. ETA was eventually reincorporated back into CDC, ceasing operations on April 17, 1989.
Operating systems and applications
The ETA10 series could run either ETA's EOSEOS (operating system)
EOS was the name of an operating system developed by ETA Systems for use in their ETA10 line of supercomputers in the 1980s....
operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
, which was widely criticized for various problems, or a port by Lachman Associates, a software personnel firm, of UNIX
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
System V (Release 3). While EOS suffered a reputation for poor quality, ETA's UNIX was better received by customers.
Use of the ETA10 was rather complicated, and required all programs be loaded via attached Apollo Computer
Apollo Computer
Apollo Computer, Inc., founded 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts by William Poduska and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo was one of the first vendors of graphical workstations in the 1980s...
workstation
Workstation
A workstation is a high-end microcomputer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems...
s. The program would then run once, and to run again would require re-loading from the Apollo. The ETA10 itself had no graphical console or local network interface, and all visualization of resulting data was performed by separate workstations after being retrieved from the Apollos. Programming for the ETA10 series could be done in FORTRAN
Fortran
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
, C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
, or assembly language
Assembly language
An assembly language is a low-level programming language for computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other programmable devices. It implements a symbolic representation of the machine codes and other constants needed to program a given CPU architecture...
.
Criticism
Despite eventual adoption of UNIXUnix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
, poorly developed system software remained one flaw of the ETA10 line. According to one description of the system:
- 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 ETA10 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.
Anderson, Christopher (Nov. 27, 1989). NSF Supercomputer Program Looks Beyond Princeton Recall. The Scientist 3 (23), p. 2. (http://www.the-scientist.com/yr1989/nov/anderson_p2_891127.html).
It is a mistake to believe that ETA's demise was based solely on operating system choice or existence. The Fortran
Fortran
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
compiler (ftn200) had not changed from the CDC205. This compiler retained vendor-specific programming performance features (known as the Q8* subroutine calls) in an era when supercomputer users were realizing the necessity of source code portability between architectures. Additionally, the compiler optimizations were not keeping up with existing technology as shown by the Japanese supercomputer vendors as well as the newer minisupercomputer makers and competition at Cray Research.
In general, computer hardware manufacturers prior and up to that period tended to be weak on software. Libraries and available commercial and non-commercial (soon to be called open-source) applications help an installed base of machine. CDC was relatively weak in this area. It is worth noting that some of the best operating systems that CDC provided to customers were productized versions of an OS written by Lawrence Livermore Laboratories.
According to NASA, the hardware was very poorly designed, and failed to complete any acceptance tests at AMES. See: A History of the ETA-10Q Acceptance Tests at NAS for a much less misleading discussion on criticism than seen above. This one event is considered amongst CDC insiders to be the downfall of ETA, which folded as a result of NASA saying no (and in a domino effect DOD, etc.).
Models
The ETA10-F and ETA10-G (7 ns clock cycle) were the highest-performing members of the ETA10 line, and used liquid nitrogen cooling to achieve rapid cycle times.Less-costly air-cooled versions were later offered, such as the two-processor ETA10-Q (19 ns clock cycle), and the ETA10-P, which was also called "Piper".
Any of the ETA10 models could be built in either single- or multi-processor configurations.
Performance
Between the highest-performing, liquid-nitrogen cooled models (ETA10-E, G, etc.) and the cheaper, air-cooled models (ETA10-P, Q, etc.), the ETA10 line spanned a 27:1 performance range. Peak performance on the top-of-the-line models reached 10 GFLOPS.According to LINPACK
LINPACK
LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Gilbert Stewart, and was intended for use on supercomputers in the 1970s and early 1980s...
benchmark
Benchmark (computing)
In computing, a benchmark is the act of running a computer program, a set of programs, or other operations, in order to assess the relative performance of an object, normally by running a number of standard tests and trials against it...
, an ETA10 with a single processor achieved 52 MFLOPS on 100^2 LINPACK.
Description
The ETA10 was a multiprocessorMultiprocessor
Computer system having two or more processing units each sharing main memory and peripherals, in order to simultaneously process programs.Sometimes the term Multiprocessor is confused with the term Multiprocessing....
system that supported up to eight CPUs. Each CPU was similar to that of a two-lane Cyber 205. One of the main innovations of the ETA10 was how the CPU was implemented: the CPU was made of 250 CMOS
CMOS
Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor is a technology for constructing integrated circuits. CMOS technology is used in microprocessors, microcontrollers, static RAM, and other digital logic circuits...
gate array
Gate array
A gate array or uncommitted logic array is an approach to the design and manufacture of application-specific integrated circuits...
integrated circuit
Integrated circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is an electronic circuit manufactured by the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material...
s mounted on a 44-layer printed circuit board
Printed circuit board
A printed circuit board, or PCB, is used to mechanically support and electrically connect electronic components using conductive pathways, tracks or signal traces etched from copper sheets laminated onto a non-conductive substrate. It is also referred to as printed wiring board or etched wiring...
(PCB). Each gate array contained 20,000 gates
Logic gate
A logic gate is an idealized or physical device implementing a Boolean function, that is, it performs a logical operation on one or more logic inputs and produces a single logic output. Depending on the context, the term may refer to an ideal logic gate, one that has for instance zero rise time and...
and was fabricated using 1.25-micrometre
Micrometre
A micrometer , is by definition 1×10-6 of a meter .In plain English, it means one-millionth of a meter . Its unit symbol in the International System of Units is μm...
(μm) technology that was accessible from the VHSIC
VHSIC
VHSIC was a 1980s U.S. government program to develop very-high-speed integrated circuits.The United States Department of Defense launched the VHSIC project in 1980 as a joint tri-service project. The project led to advances in integrated circuit materials, lithography, packaging, testing, and...
program at Honeywell. In contrast, mainstream commercial technology at the time was in the 3 to 5 μm range.
CMOS circuitry, which was not typically used in vector supercomputer CPUs at the time, was chosen because of the high density achievable, which reduces both the on-chip and off-chip delay. The CPU delays were managed through careful tuning of each PCB manufactured in conjunction with the logic technology and incorporated two key technologies known as JTAG
JTAG
Joint Test Action Group is the common name for what was later standardized as the IEEE 1149.1 Standard Test Access Port and Boundary-Scan Architecture. It was initially devised for testing printed circuit boards using boundary scan and is still widely used for this application.Today JTAG is also...
and BIST
Bist
Bist may refer to:*Bansal Institute of Science and Technology in Bhopal, India*Bist on the France-Germany border*Bist in Azerbaijan*Built-in self-test, an integrated circuit feature...
. The gate arrays were designed using a combination of internally developed simulator and placement tools, and one of the first commercial electronic design automation
Electronic design automation
Electronic design automation is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems such as printed circuit boards and integrated circuits...
tools (an application for schematic capture) from Mentor Graphics
Mentor Graphics
Mentor Graphics, Inc is a US-based multinational corporation dealing in electronic design automation for electrical engineering and electronics, as of 2004, ranked third in the EDA industry it helped create...
. Prior to the use of schematic capture at ETA, designers used textual netlist
Netlist
The word netlist can be used in several different contexts, but perhaps the most popular is in the field of electronic design. In this context, a "netlist" describes the connectivity of an electronic design....
s to describe the interconnection of the logic circuits.
However, CMOS circuitry at that time was significantly slower than that of bipolar
Bipolar junction transistor
|- align = "center"| || PNP|- align = "center"| || NPNA bipolar transistor is a three-terminal electronic device constructed of doped semiconductor material and may be used in amplifying or switching applications. Bipolar transistors are so named because their operation involves both electrons...
circuitry, especially the emitter-coupled logic
Emitter-coupled logic
In electronics, emitter-coupled logic , is a logic family that achieves high speed by using an overdriven BJT differential amplifier with single-ended input, whose emitter current is limited to avoid the slow saturation region of transistor operation....
that was widely used in vector supercomputer CPUs at the time. To compensate for this, the CPU was immersed in -196.15 °C liquid nitrogen
Liquid nitrogen
Liquid nitrogen is nitrogen in a liquid state at a very low temperature. It is produced industrially by fractional distillation of liquid air. Liquid nitrogen is a colourless clear liquid with density of 0.807 g/mL at its boiling point and a dielectric constant of 1.4...
for cooling. Although such cooling could potentially speed up the CMOS logic by a factor of four, in practice the liquid nitrogen cooling yielded an approximately twofold speed increase over air-cooled systems. However, because liquid nitrogen cooling yielded only marginal performance benefits, none of the ETA10 systems used such cooling for either the local or shared memories. It is of particular note that in order for this type of cooling to be effective, a closed-loop system was required. ETA had to innovate to make this possible, since there were not any commercially available solutions in the market. The 44-layer PCB was also innovative, and ETA had to develop new processes to manufacture it.
Each CPU had its own 4 million word local memory built from SRAM ICs. Each CPU is also connected to a 256 million word shared memory built from DRAM ICs. In addition to these memories, there is a communication buffer used for CPU synchronization and other multiprocessor-related protocol communication. I/O was facilitated by one to eighteen I/O processors that each have a direct path to the shared memory. The ETA10 used fiber-optic lines for communication between the CPUs and I/O devices, a novel approach for systems interconnection in the 1980s.
Installations
Before ETA Systems was reincorporated into CDC, a total of 25 systems were delivered. Among the recipients were:- Florida State UniversityFlorida State UniversityThe Florida State University is a space-grant and sea-grant public university located in Tallahassee, Florida, United States. It is a comprehensive doctoral research university with medical programs and significant research activity as determined by the Carnegie Foundation...
(took delivery of the first ETA10 system, serial number 1, on January 5, 1987) - Johnson Space Center
- John von Neumann Supercomputer Center (when no buyers could be found for the two ETA10 machines at this center, they were destroyed with sledgehammers to prevent illicit use)
- Purdue UniversityPurdue UniversityPurdue University, located in West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S., is the flagship university of the six-campus Purdue University system. Purdue was founded on May 6, 1869, as a land-grant university when the Indiana General Assembly, taking advantage of the Morrill Act, accepted a donation of land and...
(contributed to ETA System V, the System V UNIXUnixUnix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
variant that ran on the ETA10). - Tokyo Institute of TechnologyTokyo Institute of TechnologyThe Tokyo Institute of Technology is a public research university located in Greater Tokyo Area, Japan. Tokyo Tech is the largest institution for higher education in Japan dedicated to science and technology. Tokyo Tech enrolled 4,850 undergaraduates and 5006 graduate students for 2009-2010...
Took delivery of an 8-CPU liquid-cooled system in 1988 - Academia Sinica
- Deutscher Wetterdienst
By the end of the 1980s, the remaining ETA10 systems were donated to high schools through a computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
competition, SuperQuest
SuperQuest
SuperQuest is an American computational competition for high school students. Computational projects are proposed by various high school teams. An expert panel evaluates all of the entries and selects about four winning teams for each participating center...
:
- Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and TechnologyThomas Jefferson High School for Science and TechnologyThomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is a Virginia state-chartered magnet school located within Fairfax County, Virginia, United States...