ETA Systems
Encyclopedia
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.
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.
William Norris
was convinced the only way to regain a foothold would be to spin off a division that would be free from management prodding. 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.
. It was essentially a modernized version of the CDC Cyber
-205 computer, and deliberately kept compatibility 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 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 CPUs to operate on a ~7ns cycle, so a fully loaded ETA-10 was capable of about 9.1 GFLOPS. The design goal had been 10 GFLOPS, so the design was technically a failure. Two LN2-cooled models were designated ETA-10E and ETA-10G. Two slower, lower-cost air-cooled versions, the ETA-10Q and ETA-10P (code named "Piper") were also marketed.
The planned follow-on was supposed to be designated ETA-30, as in 30 GFLOPS.
for the ETA-10 line was initially regarded as a disaster. When CDC and ETA first designed the ETA architecture, they made the conscious decision not to merely port the CDC VSOS operating system from the existing CDC Cyber 205. It was felt by both the vendor, and the existing customer base (who wrongly believed that their vendor knew best), that a new OS needed to be written to extract the best performance from the hardware.
When the first ETA-10 E 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 Computer
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 in late 1986 and early 1987. 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.
ETA's demise was not based solely on operating system choice or existence. The Fortran
compiler (ftn200) had not changed significantly 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 optimization
s were not keeping up with existing technology as shown by the Japanese supercomputer vendors (e.g. NEC) 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 machines. CDC was relatively weak in this area.
In April 1989 CDC decided to shut down the ETA operation and keep a bare-bones continuation effort alive at CDC. At shutdown, 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.
, the Basque separatist group, or the Eta
, the Japanese social minority (especially as Japan was considered a market), see ETA (disambiguation)
. According to one of the CPU designers at ETA, Neil told a story that his son actually came up with the name - apparently a linotype machine
has characters arranged in the order of frequency used in the English language (etaoin / shrdlu / cmfwyp / vbgkqj / xz) - and the first 3 letters were used.
Another theory asserts the name was chosen based on the frequency of English alphabet letters due in part to the then current popularity of Douglas Hofstadter
's 1980 book Gödel, Escher, Bach
which used ETAOIN, etc., to capitalize on popularity and current hip-ness.
A third, completely plausible theory, is that ETA was a successor name to the much earlier Engineering Research Associates
ERA: Engineering Technology Associates. Norris and others have denied this.
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...
company spun off from 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) 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.
Historical development
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...
left CDC in the early 1970s when they refused to continue funding of his CDC 8600
CDC 8600
The CDC 8600 was the last of Seymour Cray's supercomputer designs while working for the Control Data Corporation. The "natural successor" to the CDC 6600 and CDC 7600, the 8600 was intended to be about 10 times as fast as the 7600, already the fastest computer on the market.Development started in...
project. Instead they continued with 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....
while Cray went off to build the Cray-1
Cray-1
The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured, and marketed by Cray Research. The first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976, and it went on to become one of the best known and most successful supercomputers in history...
. Cray's machine was much faster than the STAR, and soon CDC found itself pushed out of the supercomputing market.
William Norris
William Norris
William Charles Norris was the pioneering CEO of Control Data Corporation, at one time one of the most powerful and respected computer companies in the world...
was convinced the only way to regain a foothold would be to spin off a division that would be free from management prodding. 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
FLOPS
In computing, FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second...
machine by 1986.
Products
ETA had only one product, the ETA-10ETA10
The ETA10 was a line of vector supercomputers designed, manufactured, and marketed by ETA Systems, a spin-off division of Control Data Corporation . The ETA10 was announced in 1986, with the first deliveries made in early 1987...
. It was essentially a modernized version of the CDC Cyber
CDC Cyber
The CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
-205 computer, and deliberately kept compatibility with it. Like the Cyber series, the ETA-10 did not use vector registers
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...
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
Central processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
(and up to 16 I/O processors), each capable of 4 double-precision or 8 single-precision operations per clock cycle.
The main reason for the ETA-10's speed was the use of a 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...
cooling in some models to cool the logic components. Even though it was based on then-current 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...
technologies, the cooling allowed the CPUs to operate on a ~7ns cycle, so a fully loaded ETA-10 was capable of about 9.1 GFLOPS. The design goal had been 10 GFLOPS, so the design was technically a failure. Two LN2-cooled models were designated ETA-10E and ETA-10G. Two slower, lower-cost air-cooled versions, the ETA-10Q and ETA-10P (code named "Piper") were also marketed.
The planned follow-on was supposed to be designated ETA-30, as in 30 GFLOPS.
Software
SoftwareComputer software
Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....
for the ETA-10 line was initially regarded as a disaster. When CDC and ETA first designed the ETA architecture, they made the conscious decision not to merely port the CDC VSOS operating system from the existing CDC Cyber 205. It was felt by both the vendor, and the existing customer base (who wrongly believed that their vendor knew best), that a new OS needed to be written to extract the best performance from the hardware.
When the first ETA-10 E initially shipped in 1986 there was no 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...
for the machines. Programs had to be loaded one at a time from an 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...
, run, and then the supercomputer rebooted to run the next program.
At the time 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...
was making major inroads into the supercomputing fields, but ETA decided to write their own EOS
Eos
In Greek mythology, Eos is the Titan goddess of the dawn, who rose from her home at the edge of Oceanus, the ocean that surrounds the world, to herald her brother Helios, the Sun.- Greek literature :...
operating system, which wasn't ready when the first machines were delivered in late 1986 and early 1987. An operating system based on 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 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.
ETA's demise was not 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 significantly 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 optimization
Compiler optimization
Compiler optimization is the process of tuning the output of a compiler to minimize or maximize some attributes of an executable computer program. The most common requirement is to minimize the time taken to execute a program; a less common one is to minimize the amount of memory occupied...
s were not keeping up with existing technology as shown by the Japanese supercomputer vendors (e.g. NEC) as well as the newer minisupercomputer makers and competition at Cray Research
Cray
Cray Inc. is an American supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. , was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray. Seymour Cray went on to form the spin-off Cray Computer Corporation , in 1989, which went bankrupt in 1995,...
.
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 machines. CDC was relatively weak in this area.
In April 1989 CDC decided to shut down the ETA operation and keep a bare-bones continuation effort alive at CDC. At shutdown, 7 liquid-cooled and 27 air-cooled machines had been sold. At this point ETA had the best price/performance ratio
Price/performance ratio
In economics and engineering, the price/performance ratio refers to a product's ability to deliver performance, of any sort, for its price. Generally speaking, products with a higher price/performance ratio are more desirable, excluding other factors....
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
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...
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.
Naming the Firm
Neil Lincoln, chief architect, asserts that ETA is not an acronym, and otherwise means nothing, not even the well known acronym of "estimated time of arrival." In point of fact, he says that he would not have named the firm that so as to dissociate it from, ETAETA
ETA , an acronym for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna is an armed Basque nationalist and separatist organization. The group was founded in 1959 and has since evolved from a group promoting traditional Basque culture to a paramilitary group with the goal of gaining independence for the Greater Basque Country...
, the Basque separatist group, or the Eta
Burakumin
are a Japanese social minority group. The burakumin are one of the main minority groups in Japan, along with the Ainu of Hokkaidō, the Ryukyuans of Okinawa and Japanese residents of Korean and Chinese descent....
, the Japanese social minority (especially as Japan was considered a market), see ETA (disambiguation)
ETA (disambiguation)
Eta , is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabetETA is an armed Basque separatist group proscribed as a terrorist organization by the Spanish government.ETA may also refer to:* Australia's Electronic Travel Authority...
. According to one of the CPU designers at ETA, Neil told a story that his son actually came up with the name - apparently a linotype machine
Linotype machine
The Linotype typesetting machine is a "line casting" machine used in printing. The name of the machine comes from the fact that it produces an entire line of metal type at once, hence a line-o'-type, a significant improvement over manual typesetting....
has characters arranged in the order of frequency used in the English language (etaoin / shrdlu / cmfwyp / vbgkqj / xz) - and the first 3 letters were used.
Another theory asserts the name was chosen based on the frequency of English alphabet letters due in part to the then current popularity of Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics...
's 1980 book Gödel, Escher, Bach
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a book by Douglas Hofstadter, described by his publishing company as "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll"....
which used ETAOIN, etc., to capitalize on popularity and current hip-ness.
A third, completely plausible theory, is that ETA was a successor name to the much earlier Engineering Research Associates
Engineering Research Associates
Engineering Research Associates, commonly known as ERA, was a pioneering computer firm from the 1950s. They became famous for their numerical computers, but as the market expanded they became better known for their drum memory systems. They were eventually purchased by Remington Rand and merged...
ERA: Engineering Technology Associates. Norris and others have denied this.
See also
- 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...
won one of the donated ETA-10 supercomputers - 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....
was the initial operating systemOperating systemAn 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...
developed by ETA Systems - 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...
was the later, more popular operating system