The Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer (ECS) was a large

Meiko Computing Surface Meiko Scientific Ltd. was a British supercomputer company based in Bristol, founded by members of the design team working on the Inmos transputer microprocessor. History In 1985, when Inmos management suggested the release of the transputer be ...

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 ...

. This

transputer The transputer is a series of pioneering microprocessors from the 1980s, intended for parallel computing. To support this, each transputer had its own integrated memory and serial communication links to exchange data with other transputers. ...

-based,

massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of ...

system was installed at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh (, ; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a Public university, public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded by the City of Edinburgh Council, town council under th ...

during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

History

Following a pilot project involving an early 40-transputer Computing Surface installed in April 1986, funding was obtained from SERC and the DTI for a much larger system using T800 transputers and a

MicroVAX The MicroVAX is a discontinued family of low-cost minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The first model, the MicroVAX I, shipped in 1984. The series uses processors that implement the VAX instruction se ...

fileserver In computing, a file server (or fileserver) is a computer attached to a network that provides a location for shared disk access, i.e. storage of computer files (such as text, image, sound, video) that can be accessed by workstations within a co ...

. The Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer Project (ECSP) was formed to manage and support the facility, which was commissioned at the end of 1987. Over the next few years, the system received several upgrades, including more transputers (reaching, at its peak, around 400 processors) and the installation of M²VCS and

MeikOS Meiko Scientific Ltd. was a British supercomputer company based in Bristol, founded by members of the design team working on the Inmos transputer microprocessor. History In 1985, when Inmos management suggested the release of the transputer be ...

system software, which enabled

multi-user Multi-user software is computer software that allows access by multiple users of a computer. Time-sharing systems are multi-user systems. Most batch processing systems for mainframe computers may also be considered "multi-user", to avoid leavi ...

access and removed the need for the MicroVAX. In 1990, the Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer Project was succeeded by the

Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre EPCC, formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, is a supercomputing centre based at the University of Edinburgh. Since its foundation in 1990, its stated mission has been to ''accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing ...

, which consolidated the project with other

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computing, computation in which many calculations or Process (computing), processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. ...

resources and activities within the University. The ECS continued to be used for a variety of academic and commercial research work. In October 1992 the ECS was reconfigured as a SPARC-hosted Computing Surface with three SPARC "host" processors running

SunOS SunOS is a Unix-branded operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems from 1982 until the mid-1990s. The ''SunOS'' name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, which were based ...

and around 380 T800s. The system was finally decommissioned in August 1994.

References

* Wallace, D J. "Supercomputing with Transputers", ''Computing Systems in Engineering'', Volume 1, Issue 1, 1990, Pages 131-141, , Pergamon Press, Inc. Elmsford, NY, USA
Brown, Mike. "The Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer: an appreciation", ''EPCC News'', No.24, 1994.

External links

EPCC History page
{{super-compu-stub Supercomputers University of Edinburgh School of Informatics