Ardent Computer

The Ardent Computer Corporation was a graphics minicomputer manufacturing company. They were one of a very few 3rd parties to base their designs on the MIPS CPUs and the associated MIPS OS. The systems also used the Intel i860 as graphics co-processors. The company went through a series of mergers and re-organizations and changed names several times as their venture capital funders attempted to find a market niche for their "graphics supercomputers". After a series of machines that were not particularly successful in the marketplace, they used parts of their design to create graphics subsystems for other workstations, notably DEC machines, but eventually shut down completely in February 1995.

Origins

Ardent started as Dana Computer in November 1985 in Silicon Valley. Their aim was to produce a desktop supercomputer dedicated to graphics, parallel computing machines that could support up to four processor units. Each processor unit consisted initially of a MIPS R2000 CPU, and later R3000, connected to a custom vector processor. The vector unit held a whopping 8,192 64-bit registers that could be used in any way from 8192 1-word to 32 256-word registers. This compares to modern SIMD systems which allow for perhaps eight to sixteen 128-bit registers with a small variety of addressing schemes.

Dana/Ardent software was 4.2 BSD Unix and the Convex Fortran (and C) compiler system. Their significant graphics system for visualization was AVS.

After learning that the name Dana was already in use by a local disk drive company, they became Ardent. Their business plan called for their Titan system to outperform anything in the market, to be ready for beta testing in July 1987, and sell at a price of around $50,000. By late 1986 it was clear their estimates were unrealistic, the machine was still not ready and considerably more development was needed. A second round of funding was provided by Kubota, a Japanese heavy industries player (best known in North America for their tractors) who was cash-flush and looking for new opportunities. Kubota agreed not only to fund the completion of the Titan but also to provide production facilities in Japan. By the time it was finally ready for testing in February 1988, the performance leadership position of Titan had been eroded, and the price had risen to $80,000.

tardent

At almost the same time, Stellar was forming in the Boston area from former Apollo Computer members, aiming to produce a workstation system with enough power to be a serious threat to the Ardent, at a lower price point. Ardent decided to fight back, and started work on a new desktop design known as Stiletto, which included two MIPS R3000's (paired with two R3010 FPU's) and four i860's handing the graphics processing (replacing the vector units).

In 1989 Kubota forced a merger of the two to produce Stardent Computers. In an odd twist, the original Stellar group was left with most of the corporate power. [cite book|title=Supercomputing in Engineering Analysis |author=Hojjat Adeli|year=1991|publisher=CRC Press|id=ISBN 0824785592|url= http://books.google.com/books?id=3GqB6DknJl0C&pg=RA1-PA115&dq=%22Ardent+Computer%22&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=html&sig=QpZ4qXknS_rSrk4M8RIGfhLClEQ] A number of the Ardent people were less than happy with this move, and quit to form other companies. Others attempted to get Kubota to spin off the original development group as a new company called Comet, but nothing came of this.

In 1990 Stilleto was entering beta when the east-coast management decided to shut down the entire west coast office. Kubota finally saw the error of their ways, and attempted to get Stardent to continue development of Stilleto, and when they failed to do so, formed Kubota Pacific. However Stardent owned the rights to the Titan and Stilleto lines, so the new company had to develop new machines from scratch. Stardent itself eventually went bankrupt in late 1991, selling the rights back to Kubota.

Kubota Graphics

By this point SGI, originally an add-in board manufacturer for Sun Microsystems workstations, had wrapped up the entire (small) graphics market. Kubota Pacific cast about looking for direction, before finally settling on an i860-based expansion card for the DEC Alpha-based DEC 3000 AXP workstations, called Denali. Somewhere during this period the company changed names again, becoming Kubota Graphics Company. Denali ended up being an excellent product, but sales were not enough to keep the company going. Kubota Graphics closed down in 1994.

ee also

*Ardent Window Manager

References

External links

* [http://www1.neweb.ne.jp/wa/igaweb/Kubota/vistra.html Images of the Kubota Vistra workstation]