Caltech Cosmic Cube
The Caltech Cosmic Cube was a parallel computer, developed by Charles Seitz and Geoffrey Fox from 1981 onward.[1]
It was an early attempt to capitalise on VLSI to speed up scientific calculations at a reasonable cost. Using commodity hardware and an architecture suited to the specific task (QCD), Fox and Seitz demonstrated that this was indeed possible.
In 1987 several people in the group formed a company called Parasoft to commercialize the message passing interface developed for the Cosmic Cube.[2]
Characteristics
- 64 Intel 8086/87 processors[3]
- 128kB of memory per processor
- 6-dimensional hypercube network, i. e. each processor can directly exchange data with six other processors.
References
- The Torus Routing Chip
- Parallel Computer Archival Documents
- John Apostolakis, Clive Baillie, Robert W. Clayton, Hong Ding, Jon Flower, Geoffrey C. Fox, Thomas D. Gottschalk, Bradford H. Hager, Herbert B. Keller, Adam K. Kolawa, Steve W. Otto, Toshiro Tanimoto, Eric F. van de Velde, J. Barhen, J. R. Einstein, and C. C. Jorgensen. 1989. Supercomputer applications of the hypercube. In Supercomputing systems: architectures, design, and performance, Svetlana P. Kartashev and Steven I. Kartashev (Eds.). Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., New York, NY, USA 480-577.
External links