Floating Point Systems, Inc. (FPS), was a

Beaverton, Oregon Beaverton is a city in Washington County, in the U.S. state of Oregon with a small portion bordering Portland in the Tualatin Valley. The city is among the main cities that make up the Portland metropolitan area. Its population was 97,494 at the ...

vendor of attached

array processor In computing, a vector processor or array processor is a central processing unit (CPU) that implements an instruction set where its instructions are designed to operate efficiently and effectively on large one-dimensional arrays of data called ' ...

s and minisupercomputers. The company was founded in 1970 by former Tektronix engineer Norm Winningstad, with partners Tom Prince, Frank Bouton and Robert Carter. Carter was a salesman for Data General Corp. who persuaded Bouton and Prince to leave Tektronix to start the new company. Winningstad was the fourth partner.

History

The original goal of the company was to supply economical, but high-performance, floating point

coprocessor A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor (the CPU). Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating-point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, cryptography o ...

s for

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ...

s. In 1976, the '' AP-120B''

was produced. This was soon followed by a unit for larger systems and IBM mainframes, the

FPS AP-190 FPS may refer to: Arts and entertainment * F.P.S. (Law & Order: Criminal Intent), "F.P.S." (''Law & Order: Criminal Intent''), an episode of the TV show ''Law & Order: Criminal Intent'' * ''fps magazine'', a defunct magazine about animation * '' ...

. In 1981, the follow-on ''FPS-164'' was produced, followed by the FPS-264, which had the same architecture. This was five times faster, using ECL instead of TTL chips. These processors were widely used as attached processors for scientific applications in

reflection seismology Reflection seismology (or seismic reflection) is a method of exploration geophysics that uses the principles of seismology to estimate the properties of the Earth's subsurface from reflected seismic waves. The method requires a controlled seismi ...

, physical chemistry, NSA cryptology and other disciplines requiring large numbers of computations. Attached array processors were usually used in facilities where larger supercomputers were either not needed or not affordable. Hundreds if not thousands of FPS boxes were delivered and highly regarded. FPS's primary competition up to this time was IBM (3838 array processor) and CSP Inc. Cornell University, led by physicist Kenneth G. Wilson, made a supercomputer proposal to NSF with IBM to produce a processor array of FPS boxes attached to an IBM mainframe with the name ''lCAP''.

Parallel processing

In 1986, the ''T-Series''

hypercube In geometry, a hypercube is an ''n''-dimensional analogue of a square () and a cube (). It is a closed, compact, convex figure whose 1- skeleton consists of groups of opposite parallel line segments aligned in each of the space's dimensions, ...

computers using INMOS transputers and Weitek

floating-point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can b ...

processors was introduced. The T stood for " Tesseract". Unfortunately, parallel processing was still in its infancy and the software tools and libraries for the T-Series didn't facilitate customers' parallel programming. I/O was also difficult, so the T-Series was discontinued, a mistake costing tens of millions of dollars that was nearly fatal to FPS. A few dozen T-series were delivered.

Celerity acquisition; acquisition by Cray

In 1988, FPS acquired the assets of

Celerity Computing Celerity Computing Inc. was a San Diego, California vendor of Unix-based "supermini" computers. Celerity Computing was founded in May 1983 by Steve Vallender, Nick Aneshansley and Andrew McCroklin. Celerity shipped its first product, the C1200 P ...

of San Diego, California, renaming itself as FPS Computing. Celerity's product lines were further developed by FPS, the

Celerity 6000 Celerity (Latin ''celeritas'') may refer to: * Speed, quickness * Speed of light, ''celeritas'' * Celerity BBS, a computer bulletin board system popular in the 1990s * Celerity Computing Inc., defunct San Diego, California vendor * Celerity IT, a ...

minisupercomputer being developed into the ''FPS Model 500'' series. FPS was acquired by

Cray Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed ...

in 1991 for $3.25 million, and their products became the '' S-MP'' and ''APP'' product lines of Cray Research. The S-MP was a SPARC-based multiprocessor server (based on the Model 500); the MCP a matrix co-processor array based on eighty-four Intel i860 processors. After Cray purchased FPS, it changed the group's direction by making them ''Cray Research Superservers, Inc.'', later becoming the Cray Business Systems Division (Cray BSD). The MCP was renamed the Cray APP. The S-MP architecture was not developed further. Instead, it was replaced by the '' Cray Superserver 6400'', (CS6400), which was derived indirectly from a collaboration between

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

and Xerox PARC.

Acquisition by SGI and Sun

Silicon Graphics acquired Cray Research in 1996, and shortly afterward the Cray BSD business unit along with the CS6400 product line was sold to Sun Microsystems for an undisclosed amount (acknowledged later by a Sun executive to be "significantly less than $100 million"). Sun was then able to bring to market the follow-on to the CS6400 which Cray BSD was developing at the time, codenamed ''Starfire'', launching it as the Ultra Enterprise 10000 multiprocessor server. This system was followed by the

Sun Fire 15K The Sun Fire 15K (codenamed ''Starcat'') was an enterprise-class server computer from Sun Microsystems based on the SPARC V9 processor architecture. It was announced on September 25, 2001, in New York City, superseding the Sun Enterprise 10000. Gene ...

and Sun Fire 25K. These systems allowed Sun to become a first tier vendor in the large server market. In January 2010, Sun was acquired by Oracle Corporation.

References

External links