MasPar
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MasPar Computer Corporation was a minisupercomputer vendor that was founded in 1987 by Jeff Kalb. The company was based in Santa Clara, California.
While Kalb was the Vice-President of DEC's VLSI chip-building division, some researchers in that division were building a supercomputer based on the Goodyear MPP (massively parallel processor) supercomputer. The DEC researchers enhanced the architecture by:
- making the processor elements to be 4-bit instead of 1-bit
- increasing the connectivity of each processor element to 8 neighbors from 4.
- adding a global interconnect for all of the processing elements, which was a triple-redundant switch which was easier to implement than a full crossbar switch.
After Digital decided not to productize the research project, Kalb decided to start a company to sell this minisupercomputer. In 1990, the first generation product MP-1 was delivered. In 1992, the follow-on MP-2 was shipped. The company shipped a total of 200 systems.
By 1996, the company had halted hardware development and transformed itself into a data mining software company named Neovista Software. In 1999, Neovista was acquired by Accrue Software.
