An ETA-10 supercomputer installation The ETA-10 was a line of supercomputers manufactured by ETA Systems (a spin-off division of CDC) in the 1980s and which implemented the instruction set of the CDC Cyber 205.
Historical development
After being spun off from CDC in September, 1983, ETA had the goal of producing a supercomputer with a cycle time under 10ns. To accomplish this goal, several innovations were made by ETA. Among these are the use of liquid nitrogen for cooling the CMOS circuits of the computer.
The ETA-10 successfully met the company's initial goals, with some models achieving a cycle time of about 7ns, which was considered rapid by the standard of the mid-1980s.
ETA was eventually reincorporated back into CDC, and ETA ceased operations April 17, 1989.
The ETA-10 series could run either ETA's EOS operating system, which was widely criticized for various problems, or a port by ETA 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 ETA-10 was rather complicated, and required all programs be loaded via attached Apollo Computers workstations. The program would then run once, and to run again would require re-loading from the Apollo.
The ETA-10 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 ETA-10 series could be done in FORTRAN, C, or CDC Cyber 205 assembly language.
Criticism
Despite eventual adoption of UNIX, poorly developed system software remained the major flaw of the ETA-10 line. According to one description of the system:
- Without NSF funding, the von Neumann center could be doomed. "I dont 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.
Anderson, Christopher (Nov. 27, 1989). NSF Supercomputer Program Looks Beyond Princeton Recall. The Scientist 3 (23), p. 2. ([1] (http://www.the-scientist.com/yr1989/nov/anderson_p2_891127.html)).
Models
The ETA-10F and ETA-10G (7ns clock cycle) were the highest-performing members of the ETA-10 line, and used liquid nitrogen cooling to achieve rapid cycle times.
Less-costly air-cooled versions were later offered, such as the two-processor ETA-10Q (19ns clock cycle), and the ETA-10P, which was also called "Piper."
Any of the ETA-10 models could be built in either single- or multi-processor configurations.
Performance
Between the highest-performing, liquid-nitrogen cooled models (ETA-10E, G, etc.) and the cheaper, air-cooled models (ETA-10P, Q, etc.), the ETA-10 line spanned a 27:1 performance range. Peak performance on the top-of-the-line models reached 10 GFLOPS.
According to LINPACK benchmarks, an ETA-10 with a single processor achieved 52 MFLOPS on 100^2 LINPACK.
The ETA-10 line adopted novel approaches to physical construction, as well as innovative computer organization and lay-out processes:
CMOS circuits
The ETA-10's CPU was built on a single board, using 44-layer PCB. The ETA-10 line is also notable for using CMOS logic technology, which has become the standard process used to menufacture the great majority of microprocessors in the 2000s. The benefit of using CMOS lies partly in its rapid switching speeds, in the low tens of picoseconds; the ETA-10 line put this to use with an approximately 80Mhz clock speed. Further, although slower than ECL at the time, CMOS circuitry could be laid out on a wafer more densely than permitted by ECL, thus ameliorating various off-chip and on-chip delays.
Liquid nitrogen cooling
The highest performance was achieved by cooling the CMOS logic with liquid nitrogen. Although such cooling could potentially speed up execution by a factor of four, in practice the liquid nitrogen cooling yielded an approximately twofold execution speed increase over air-cooled systems. However, because liquid nitrogen cooling yielded only marginal performance benefits, none of the ETA-10 systems used such cooling for either the local or system-wide memory subsystems.
Fiber-optic interlinks between subsystems
The ETA-10 used fiber-optic lines for communication between processors 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 University (took delivery of the first ETA-10 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 ETA-10 machines at this center, they were destroyed with sledgehammers to prevent illicit use)
By the end of the 1980s, the remaining ETA-10 systems were donated to high schools through a computer science competition, SuperQuest.
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