Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer

Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer

The Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer (ECS) was a large Meiko Computing Surface supercomputer. This transputer-based, massively parallel system was installed at the University of Edinburgh during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

History

Following a pilot project involving an early 40-transputer Computing Surface installed in April 1986, funding was obtained from SERC and the DTI for a much larger system using T800 transputers and a MicroVAX fileserver. The Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer Project (ECSP) was formed to manage and support the facility, which was commissioned at the end of 1987.

Over the next few years, the system received several upgrades, including more transputers (reaching, at its peak, around 400 processors) and the installation of M²VCS and MeikOS system software, which enabled multi-user access and removed the need for the MicroVAX.

In 1990, the Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer Project was succeeded by the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, which consolidated the project with other parallel computing resources and activities within the University. The ECS continued to be used for a variety of academic and commercial research work.

In October 1992 the ECS was reconfigured as a SPARC-hosted Computing Surface with three SPARC "host" processors running SunOS and around 380 T800s. The system was finally decommissioned in August 1994.

References

* Wallace, D J. "Supercomputing with Transputers", "Computing Systems in Engineering", 1(1), 1990.
* [http://www2.epcc.ed.ac.uk/archive/publications/newsletters/archive/news-24/news-24www_1.html#HEADING25 Brown, Mike. "The Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer: an appreciation", "EPCC News", No.24, 1994.]

External links

* [http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/about-us/history/ EPCC History page]


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Поможем решить контрольную работу

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Transputer — A transputer was a pioneering concurrent computing microprocessor design of the 1980s from INMOS, a British semiconductor company based in Bristol. [ Allen Kent, James G. Williams (eds.) (1998) Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology ,… …   Wikipedia

  • EPCC — (formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre), is a unit within the University of Edinburgh providing a focus for the university s activities in high performance computing and computational science. The centre provides services and expertise …   Wikipedia

  • Flow-based programming — In computer science, flow based programming (FBP) is a programming paradigm that defines applications as networks of black box processes, which exchange data across predefined connections by message passing. These black box processes can be… …   Wikipedia

  • Earth Sciences — ▪ 2009 Introduction Geology and Geochemistry       The theme of the 33rd International Geological Congress, which was held in Norway in August 2008, was “Earth System Science: Foundation for Sustainable Development.” It was attended by nearly… …   Universalium

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
… Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”