Intel iPSC/1

On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, ip500 wrote: Damn, I've been looking for one of those :-) Whatever docs I have are archived on tape and burried someplace. I played around with an iPSC/1 around 1987, so you're OK as far as the 10-year rule goes. AFAIK, it was Intel's first attempt at a supercomputer. It was based on the Cosmic Cube project at Cal Tech. It's basically a bunch of 286's in a hypercube topology. Each node had something like 512K RAM, and the internode communication wasn't very fast -- it might have been ethernet. I don't recall there being any console as such. You talked to the thing through a 286 box running Xenix connected via ethernet, which uploaded your parallel app to each of the nodes, started the app, and collected the output. It ran an OS called CrOS, which was basically just a communication manager. There was no shell or filesystem or anything like that -- the box was intended to be used as an execution engine. Intel provided a Unix-hosted simulator (which I think was developed at Cal Tech), so you could debug the apps using more or less standard tools before uploading your code. Cheers, Doug