Kendall Square Research

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Kendall Square Research (KSR) was a supercomputer company headquartered originally in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1986, near the MIT. It was co-founded by Henry Burkhardt III, who had previously helped found Data General and Encore Computer and was one of the original team that designed the PDP-8, and by Steve Frank.

[edit] Technology

Its machines ran a specially customized version of OSF/1, a Unix variant. The architecture was shared memory implemented as an all cache memory COMA. Being all cache, memory dynamically migrated and replicated in a coherent manner based on access pattern of individual processors . The processors were arranged in a hierarchy of rings, and the operating system mediated process migration and device access. Each processor was a custom 64 bit RISC CPU capable of peak output of 20 MIPS and 40 MFLOPS. 8-1088 of these processors could be arranged in a single system.

[edit] Fate of the company

As the company scaled up quickly to enter production, they moved in the early 1990s to Waltham, Massachusetts.

A few of the KSR1 models were sold, but as the KSR2 was being rolled out, the company collapsed amid accounting irregularities involving the overstatement of revenue.

One customer of the KSR2, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a United States Department of Energy facility, purchased an enormous pile of spare parts, and kept their machines running for years after the demise of KSR.

KSR, along with many of its competitors (see below) went bankrupt during the collapse of the supercomputer market in the early-1990s. KSR went out of business in late 1993. Within months, Thinking Machines followed.

[edit] Competition

KSR's competitors included Thinking Machines and Meiko, in addition to various old-line (and still surviving) companies like IBM, Intel, and Sun Microsystems.