BESM-6 (, short for ''Большая электронно-счётная машина'', i.e. 'Large Electronic Calculating Machine') was a Soviet electronic computer of the
BESM
BESM (БЭСМ) is the series of Soviet mainframe computers built in 1950–60s. The name is an acronym for "Bolshaya (or Bystrodeystvuyushchaya) Elektronno-schotnaya Mashina" ("Большая электронно-счётная машина" o ...
series.
Overview
The BESM-6 was the most well-known and influential model of the series designed at the
Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering Lebedev Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering (IPMCE) is a Russian research institution. It used to be a Soviet Academy of Sciences organization in Soviet times. The institute specializes itself in the development of:
* Comput ...
. The design was completed in 1965. Production started in 1968 and continued for the following 19 years.
Like its BESM-3 and BESM-4 predecessors, the original BESM-6 was transistor-based (however, the version used in the 1980s as a component of the
Elbrus
Mount Elbrus; ; is the highest mountain in Russia and Europe. It is a dormant volcano, dormant stratovolcano rising above sea level, and is the highest volcano in Eurasia, as well as the List of mountain peaks by prominence, tenth-most promi ...
supercomputer
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...
was built with
integrated circuits
An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...
). The machine's
48-bit
In computer architecture, 48-bit integers can represent 281,474,976,710,656 (248 or 2.814749767×1014) discrete values. This allows an unsigned binary integer range of 0 through 281,474,976,710,655 (248 − 1) or a signed two's complement ...
processor ran at 10 MHz clock speed and featured two
instruction pipelines, separate for the control and
arithmetic units, and a
data cache
A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, which ...
of sixteen 48-bit words. The system achieved a performance of 1
MIPS.
The
CDC 6600
The CDC 6600 was the flagship of the 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the I ...
, a common Western supercomputer when the BESM-6 was released, achieved about 2 MIPS.
The system memory was
word-addressable
In computer architecture, ''word addressing'' means that addresses of memory on a computer uniquely identify words of memory. It is usually used in contrast with byte addressing, where addresses uniquely identify bytes. Almost all modern compu ...
using 15-bit addresses. The maximum addressable memory space was thus 32K words (192
K bytes). A
virtual memory
In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage, is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a ver ...
system allowed to expand this up to 128K words (768
K bytes).
The BESM-6 was widely used in
USSR
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
in the 1970s for various computation and control tasks. During the 1975
Apollo-Soyuz Test Project the processing of the space mission
telemetry
Telemetry is the in situ collection of measurements or other data at remote points and their automatic transmission to receiving equipment (telecommunication) for monitoring. The word is derived from the Greek roots ''tele'', 'far off', an ...
data was accomplished by a new computer complex which was based on a BESM-6. The Apollo-Soyuz mission's data processing by Soviet scientists finished half an hour earlier than their American colleagues from
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...
.
A total of 355 of these machines were built. Production ended in 1987.
As the first Soviet computer with an installed base that was large for the time, the BESM-6 gathered a dedicated developer community. Over the years several
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
s and
compiler
In computing, a compiler is a computer program that Translator (computing), translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primaril ...
s for
programming language
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs.
Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...
s such as
Fortran,
ALGOL
ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ...
and
Pascal were developed.
A modification of the BESM-6 based on integrated circuits, with 2-3 times higher performance than the original machine, was produced in the 1980s under the name Elbrus-1K2 as a component of the
Elbrus supercomputer.
In 1992, one of the last surviving BESM-6 machines was purchased by the
Science Museum
A science museum is a museum devoted primarily to science. Older science museums tended to concentrate on static displays of objects related to natural history, paleontology, geology, Industry (manufacturing), industry and Outline of industrial ...
in
London, England
London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...
.
Peripherals
The BESM-6 could send output to an АЦПУ-128 (Алфавитно-Цифровое Печатающее Устройство) printer, and read input from
punched card
A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a stiff paper-based medium used to store digital information via the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Developed over the 18th to 20th centuries, punched cards were widel ...
s in the
GOST 10859
GOST 10859 (1964) is a standard of the Soviet Union which defined how to encode data on punched cards. This standard allowed a variable word size, depending on the type of data being encoded, but only uppercase characters.
These include the non- ...
character set
Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical values that make up a c ...
. A Consul-254
teletype
A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations.
Init ...
, made by Zbrojovka Brno in
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...
, could be used for interactive sessions. When
CRT
CRT or Crt most commonly refers to:
* Cathode-ray tube, a display
* Critical race theory, an academic framework of analysis
CRT may also refer to:
Law
* Charitable remainder trust, United States
* Civil Resolution Tribunal, Canada
* Columbia ...
terminals became available, the BESM-6 could be connected to
Videoton 340 terminals.
[The use of the "Videoton-340" video terminal with a printer on-line with the BESM-6 for electrical power network enterprise data processing. In USSR Report: Cybernetics, Computers and Automation Technology. Central Intelligence Agency, 26 December 1979.]
Further reading
* (NB. Has information on the BESM-6 character set.)
References
External links
BESM-6 Nostalgia Page
{{Mainframes
Soviet computer systems
1965 establishments in Russia
Supercomputers