FROSTBURG

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FROSTBURG on display at the National Cryptologic Museum. The light panels were used to check the usage of the processing nodes, and to run diagnostics.

FROSTBURG was a Connection Machine 5 (CM-5) supercomputer used by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to perform higher-level mathematical calculations. The CM-5 was built by the Thinking Machines Corporation, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The system was installed at the NSA in 1991, and operated until 1997. It was the first massively parallel processing computer bought by the NSA, originally containing 256 processing nodes. The system was upgraded in 1993 with an additional 256 nodes, for a total of 512 nodes. The system had a total of 500 billion 32-bit words of memory, and could perform at 65.5 gigaflops. The operating system was based on UNIX, but optimized for parallel processing.

The FROSTBURG system cost US$25 million.

[edit] See also

• HARVEST
• Cryptanalytic computer

[edit] Sources

• Caption for FROSTBURG display in the National Cryptologic Museum, 2005; see photograph.

[edit] External links

• Another photograph of FROSTBURG by Declan McCullagh