Isra Vision Parsytec AG, a subsidiary of Isra Vision, was originally founded in 1985 as Parsytec (''parallel system technology'') in

Aachen Aachen is the List of cities in North Rhine-Westphalia by population, 13th-largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia and the List of cities in Germany by population, 27th-largest city of Germany, with around 261,000 inhabitants. Aachen is locat ...

, Germany. Parsytec gained recognition in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a manufacturer of

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 parallel systems. Its product lineup ranged from single

plug-in boards for IBM PCs to large, massively parallel systems with thousands of transputers (or processors), such as the Parsytec GC. Some sources describe the latter as ultracomputer-sized, scalable multicomputers (smC). As part of ISRA VISION AG, the company now focuses on the

machine vision Machine vision is the technology and methods used to provide image, imaging-based automation, automatic inspection and analysis for such applications as automatic inspection, process control, and robot guidance, usually in industry. Machine vision ...

and industrial image processing sectors. ISRA Parsytec products are primarily used for quality and surface inspection, particularly in the metal and paper industries.

History

Parsytec was founded in 1985 in

, Germany, by Falk-Dietrich Kübler, Gerhard H. Peise, and Bernd Wolff, with an 800,000 DM grant from the Federal Ministry for Research and Technology (BMFT).Duell der Zahlenfresser
at ''zeit.de'' (German) Unlike

SUPRENUM SUPRENUM (, ) was a German research project to develop a parallel computer from 1985 through 1990. It was a major effort which was aimed at developing a national expertise in massively parallel processing both at hardware and at software level. A ...

, Parsytec focused its systems, particularly in

pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the task of assigning a class to an observation based on patterns extracted from data. While similar, pattern recognition (PR) is not to be confused with pattern machines (PM) which may possess PR capabilities but their p ...

, on industrial applications such as surface inspection. As a result, the company not only captured a significant market share in European academia but also attracted numerous industrial customers, including many outside

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

. By 1988, exports accounted for approximately one-third of Parsytec's revenue. The company's turnover figures were as follows: zero in 1985, 1.5 million DM in 1986, 5.2 million DM in 1988, 9 million DM in 1989, 15 million DM in 1990, and 17 million

USD The United States dollar (symbol: $; currency code: USD) is the official currency of the United States and several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introduced the U.S. dollar at par with the Spanish silver dollar, divided it int ...

in 1991. To allow Parsytec to focus on research and development, a separate entity, ParaCom, was established to handle sales and marketing operations. While Parsytec/ParaCom maintained its headquarters in

, Germany, it also operated subsidiary sales offices in

Chemnitz Chemnitz (; from 1953 to 1990: Karl-Marx-Stadt (); ; ) is the third-largest city in the Germany, German States of Germany, state of Saxony after Leipzig and Dresden, and the fourth-largest city in the area of former East Germany after (East Be ...

(Germany),

Southampton Southampton is a port City status in the United Kingdom, city and unitary authority in Hampshire, England. It is located approximately southwest of London, west of Portsmouth, and southeast of Salisbury. Southampton had a population of 253, ...

(United Kingdom),

Chicago Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...

(USA),

St Petersburg Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...

(Russia), and

Moscow Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...

(Russia).Parsytec GmbH
at ''new-npac.org'' In Japan, Parsytec's machines were distributed by Matsushita. Between 1988 and 1994, Parsytec developed an impressive range of

-based computers, culminating in the "Parsytec GC" (GigaCluster). This system was available in configurations ranging from 64 to 16,384

s.Parsytec
Article at ''GeekDot.com'' Parsytec went public in mid-1999 with an initial public offering (

IPO An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...

) on the German Stock Exchange in

Frankfurt Frankfurt am Main () is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Hesse. Its 773,068 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the List of cities in Germany by population, fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located in the forela ...

. On 30 April 2006, founder Falk-D. Kübler left the company. In July 2007, ISRA VISION AG acquired 52.6% of Parsytec AG. The delisting of Parsytec shares from the stock market began in December of the same year, and since 18 April 2008, Parsytec shares have no longer been listed on the stock exchange. While Parsytec had a workforce of roughly 130 staff in the early 1990s, the ISRA VISION Group employed more than 500 people in 2012/2013. Today, the core business of ISRA Parsytec within the ISRA VISION Group is the development and distribution of surface inspection systems for strip products in the metal and paper industries.

Products/Computers

Parsytec's product range included: * Megaframe ( T414/ T800) – One per board, up to ten boards in a rack or as plug-in boards * MultiCluster ( T800) – Up to 64 processors in a single rack * SuperCluster ( T800) – 16 to 1,024 processors in a single frame * GigaCluster (planned: T9000; realized: T800 or MPC 601) – 64 to 16,384 processors in "cubes" * x'plorer ( T800 or MPC 601) * Cognitive Computer ( MPC 604 and

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

Pentium Pro The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86 microprocessor developed and manufactured by Intel and introduced on November 1, 1995. It implements the P6 (microarchitecture), P6 microarchitecture (sometimes termed i686), and was the first x86 Intel C ...

) * Powermouse ( MPC 604) In total, approximately 700 stand-alone systems (SC and GC) had been shipped. Initially, Parsytec participated in the GPMIMD (General Purpose MIMD) project under the umbrella of the ESPRIT program, both of which were funded by the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the primary Executive (government), executive arm of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with a number of European Commissioner, members of the Commission (directorial system, informall ...

's Directorate for Science. However, after significant disagreements with other participants— Meiko, Parsys,

Inmos Inmos International plc (trademark INMOS) and two operating subsidiaries, Inmos Limited (UK) and Inmos Corporation (US), was a British semiconductor company founded by Iann Barron, Richard Petritz, and Paul Schroeder in July 1978. Inmos Limited ...

, and Telmat—regarding the choice of a common physical architecture, Parsytec left the project and announced its own T9000-based machine, the GC. Due to Inmos' issues with the T9000, Parsytec was forced to switch to a system using a combination of

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 and had been named Motorola since 1947. Many of Motorola's products had been ...

MPC 601 CPUs and Inmos T805 processors. This led to the development of Parsytec's "hybrid" systems (e.g., GC/PP), where

s were used as communication processors while the computational tasks were offloaded to the

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

s. Parsytec's cluster systems were operated by an external workstation, typically a

SUN The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...

workstation (e.g.,

Sun-4 Sun-4 is a series of Unix workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, first appearing in July 1987, with the launch of the Sun 4/260. The original Sun-4 series were VMEbus-based systems similar to the earlier Sun-3 series, but employi ...

). There is considerable confusion regarding the names of Parsytec products. This is partly due to the architecture, but also because of the aforementioned unavailability of the Inmos T9000, which forced Parsytec to use the T805 and

processors instead. Systems equipped with

processors were given the prefix "Power." The architecture of GC systems is based on self-contained GigaCubes. The basic architectural element of a Parsytec system was a cluster, which consisted, among other components, of four transputers/processors (i.e., a cluster is a node in the classical sense). A GigaCube (sometimes referred to as a supernode or meganode)ESN Information Bulletin 92-08
at ''dtic.mil'' consisted of four clusters (nodes), each with 16

T805

s (30 MHz),

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

(up to 4 MB per T805), and an additional redundant T805 (the 17th processor). It also included local link connections and four

C004 routing chips. Hardware fault tolerance was achieved by linking each T805 to a different C004. The unusual spelling of x'plorer led to variations like xPlorer, and the Gigacluster is sometimes referred to as the GigaCube or Grand Challenge.

Megaframe

Megaframe was the product name for a family of transputer-based parallel processing modules, some of which could be used to upgrade an

IBM PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the List of IBM Personal Computer models, IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible ''de facto'' standard. Released on ...

. As a standalone system, a Megaframe could hold up to ten processor modules. Different versions of the modules were available, such as one featuring a 32-bit transputer T414 with floating-point hardware (

Motorola 68881 The Motorola 68881 and Motorola 68882 are floating-point units (FPUs) used in some computer systems in conjunction with Motorola's 32-bit 68020 or 68030 microprocessors. These coprocessors are external chips, designed before floating point math ...

), 1 MB of

(80 nanosecond access time), and a throughput of 10 MIPS, or one with four 16-bit

s ( T22x) with 64 kB of RAM. Additionally, cards for special features were offered, including a graphics processor with a resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels and an I/O "cluster" with terminal and

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices, best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives. SCSI was introduced ...

interfaces.

Multicluster

The MultiCluster-1 series consisted of statically configurable systems that could be tailored to specific user requirements, such as the number of processors, amount of memory, I/O configuration, and system topology. The required processor topology could be configured using UniLink connections, fed through a special backplane. Additionally, four external sockets were provided. Multicluster-2 used network configuration units (NCUs) that provided flexible, dynamically configurable interconnection networks. The multiuser environment could support up to eight users through Parsytec's multiple virtual architecture software. The NCU design was based on the

crossbar switch, the C004, which offers full crossbar connectivity for up to 16 transputers. Each NCU, made of C004s, connected up to 96 UniLinks, linking internal as well as external transputers and other I/O subsystems. MultiCluster-2 allowed for the configuration of various fixed interconnection topologies, such as tree or mesh structures.

SuperCluster

SuperCluster had a hierarchical, cluster-based design. A basic unit was a 16-transputer T800, fully connected cluster, and larger systems included additional levels of NCUs to form the necessary connections. The Network Configuration Manager (NCM) software controlled the NCUs and dynamically established the required connections. Each transputer could be equipped with 1 to 32 MB of dynamic

, with single-error correction and double-error detection.

GigaCluster

The GigaCluster (GC) was a parallel computer produced in the early 1990s. A GigaCluster was composed of GigaCubes. Designed for the

T9000

s, the GigaCluster could never be launched as originally planned, as the Inmos T9000 transputers never made it to market on time. This led to the development of the GC/PP (PowerPlus), in which two

MPC 601 (80 MHz) were used as the dedicated

CPUs A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the primary Processor (computing), processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes Instruction (computing), instructions ...

, supported by four Inmos T805 transputers (30 MHz). While the GC/PP was a hybrid system, the GC_el ("entry level") was based solely on the T805. The GC_el was designed to be upgradeable to the T9000 transputers (had they arrived in time), thus becoming a full GC. Since the T9000 was Inmos' evolutionary successor to the T800, the upgrade was planned to be simple and straightforward. This was because, firstly, both transputers shared the same instruction set, and secondly, they had a similar performance ratio of compute power to communication throughput. A theoretical speed-up factor of 10 was expected,Gigacube
Article at ''GeekDot.com'' but in the end, it was never achieved. The network structure of the GC was a two-dimensional lattice, with an inter-communication speed between the nodes (i.e., clusters in Parsytec's terminology) of 20 Mbit/s. For its time, the concept of the GC was exceptionally modular and scalable. A so-called GigaCube was a module that was already a one gigaflop system and served as the building block for larger systems. A module (or "cube" in Parsytec's terminology) contained: * Four clusters, each equipped with: * 16 transputers (plus one additional transputer for redundancy, making it 17 transputers per cluster), * 4 wormhole routing chips ( C104 for the planned T9000 and C004 for the realized T805), * A dedicated power supply and communication ports. By combining modules (or cubes, respectively), one could theoretically connect up to 16,384 processors to create a very powerful system. Typical installations included: The two largest installations of the GC that were actually shipped had 1,024 processors (16 modules, with 64 transputers per module) and were operated at the data centers of the Universities of Cologne and Paderborn. In October 2004, the system at Paderborn was transferred to the Heinz Nixdorf Museums Forum, where it is now inoperable. The power consumption of a system with 1,024 processors was approximately 27 kW, and its weight was nearly a ton. In 1992, the system was priced at around 1.5 million DM. While the smaller versions, up to GC-3, were air-cooled, water cooling was mandatory for the larger systems. In 1992, a GC with 1,024 processors ranked on the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputer installations. In Germany alone, it was the 22nd fastest computer. In 1995, there were nine Parsytec computers on the TOP500 list, including two GC/PP 192 installations, which ranked 117th and 188th. In 1996, they still ranked 230th and 231st on the TOP500 list.

x'plorer

The x'plorer model came in two versions: The initial version featured 16

s, each with access to 4 MB of

, and was called x'plorer. Later, when Parsytec switched to the PPC architecture, it was renamed POWERx'plorer and featured 8 MPC 601

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the primary processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes instructions of a computer program, such as arithmetic, log ...

s. Both models were housed in the same desktop case, designed by Via 4 Design. In any model, the x'plorer was essentially a single "slice" — which Parsytec referred to as a cluster — of a GigaCube (PPC or Transputer), with the smallest version (GC-1) using 4 of these clusters. As a result, some referred to it as a "GC-0.25." The POWERx'plorer was based on 8 processing units arranged in a 2D mesh. Each processing unit included: # One 80 MHz MPC 601 processor, # 8 MB of local memory, and # A transputer for establishing and maintaining communication links.

Cognitive Computer

The Parsytec CC (Cognitive Computer) system was an autonomous unit at the card rack level. The CC card rack subsystem provided the system with its infrastructure, including power supply and cooling. The system could be configured as a standard 19-inch rack-mounted unit, which accepted various 6U plug-in modules. The CC system was a distributed memory, message-passing parallel computer and is globally classified in the MIMD category of parallel computers. There were two different versions available: * CCe: Based on the

MPC 604 processor running at 133 MHz with 512 KB L2 cache. The modules were connected together at 1 Gbit/s using high-speed (HS) link technology according to the IEEE 1355 standard, allowing data transfer at up to 75 MB/s. The communication controller was integrated into the processor nodes through the

PCI bus PCI may refer to: Business and economics * Payment card industry, businesses associated with debit, credit, and other payment cards ** Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, a set of security requirements for credit card processors * Pro ...

. The system board used the MPC 105 chip for memory control,

DRAM Dram, DRAM, or drams may refer to: Technology and engineering * Dram (unit), a unit of mass and volume, and an informal name for a small amount of liquor, especially whisky or whiskey * Dynamic random-access memory, a type of electronic semicondu ...

refresh, and memory decoding for banks of DRAM and/or Flash. The CPU bus speed was limited to 66 MHz, while the PCI bus speed was a maximum of 33 MHz. * CCi: Based on the

, its core elements were dual

-based motherboards (at 266 MHz), which were interconnected using several high-speed networks. Each dual motherboard had 128 MB of memory. Each node had a peak performance of 200 MFLOPS. The operating systems were Windows NT 4.0 and ParsyFrame (with an optional UNIX environment).Parallel Computing Hardware
at ''ssd.sscc.ru'' In all CC systems, the nodes were directly connected to the same router, which implemented an active hardware 8x8 crossbar switch for up to 8 connections using the 40 MB/s high-speed link. Regarding the CCe, the software was based on

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

AIX Aix or AIX may refer to: Computing * AIX, a line of IBM computer operating systems *Alternate index, for an IBM Virtual Storage Access Method key-sequenced data set * Athens Internet Exchange, a European Internet exchange point Places Belg ...

4.1 UNIX operating system, along with Parsytec's parallel programming environment, Embedded PARIX (EPX).Embedded Parix Ver. 1.9.2, Software Documentation (1996)
/ref> This setup combined a standard

UNIX Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

environment (including compilers, tools, and libraries) with an advanced software development environment. The system was integrated into the local area network using standard Ethernet. As a result, a CC node had a peak performance of 266 MFLOPS. The peak performance of the 8-node CC system installed at Geneva University Hospital was therefore 2.1

GFLOPS Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...

.Implementation of an Environment for Monte Carlo simulation of Fully 3-D Positron Tomography on a High-Performance Parallel Platform
H. Zaidi, Parallel Computing, Vol. 24 (1998), pp. 1523-1536

Powermouse

Powermouse was another scalable system that consisted of modules and individual components. It was a straightforward extension of the x'plorer system. Each module (dimensions: 9 cm x 21 cm x 45 cm) contained four MPC 604 processors (200/300 MHz) and 64 MB of

, achieving a peak performance of 2.4 GFLOPS. A separate communication processor ( T425) equipped with 4 MB of RAM controlled the data flow in four directions to other modules in the system. The bandwidth of a single node was 9 MB/s. For about 35,000 DM, a basic system consisting of 16

s (i.e., four modules) could provide a total computing power of 9.6 Gflop/s. As with all Parsytec products, Powermouse required a

Sun The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...

Sparcstation The SPARCstation, SPARCserver and SPARCcenter product lines are a series of SPARC-based computer workstations and server (computing), servers in desktop, desk side (pedestal) and rack-based form factor configurations, that were developed and sol ...

as the front-end. All software, including PARIX with C++ and Fortran 77 compilers and debuggers (alternatively providing

MPI MPI or Mpi may refer to: Science and technology Biology and medicine * Magnetic particle imaging, a tomographic technique * Myocardial perfusion imaging, a medical procedure that illustrates heart function * Mannose phosphate isomerase, an enzyme ...

or PVM as user interfaces), was included.

Operating system

The operating system used was PARIX (PARallel UnIX extensions) – PARIX^T8 for the T80x

s and PARIX^T9 for the T9000

s, respectively. Based on

, PARIX supported

remote procedure call In distributed computing, a remote procedure call (RPC) is when a computer program causes a procedure (subroutine) to execute in a different address space (commonly on another computer on a shared computer network), which is written as if it were a ...

s and was compliant with the

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX; ) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...

standard. PARIX provided

functionality at the front-end (e.g., a

SPARCstation The SPARCstation, SPARCserver and SPARCcenter product lines are a series of SPARC-based computer workstations and server (computing), servers in desktop, desk side (pedestal) and rack-based form factor configurations, that were developed and sol ...

, which had to be purchased separately) with library extensions for the needs of the parallel system at the back-end, which was the Parsytec product itself (connected to the front-end for operation). The PARIX software package included components for the program development environment (compilers, tools, etc.) and the runtime environment (libraries). PARIX offered various types of synchronous and asynchronous communication. In addition, Parsytec provided a parallel programming environment called Embedded PARIX (EPX). To develop parallel applications using EPX, data streams and function tasks were allocated to a network of nodes. The data handling between processors required only a few system calls. Standard routines for synchronous communication, such as send and receive, were available, as well as asynchronous system calls. The full set of EPX calls formed the EPX application programming interface (

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

). The destination for any message transfer was defined through a virtual channel that ended at any user-defined process. Virtual channels were managed by EPX and could be defined by the user. The actual message delivery system utilized the router. Additionally, COSY (Concurrent Operating SYstem)COSY – ein Betriebssystem für hochparallele Computer
R. Butenuth at ''uni-paderborn.de'' (German) and

Helios In ancient Greek religion and Greek mythology, mythology, Helios (; ; Homeric Greek: ) is the god who personification, personifies the Sun. His name is also Latinized as Helius, and he is often given the epithets Hyperion ("the one above") an ...

could also be run on the machines. Helios supported Parsytec's special reset mechanism out of the box.

References

External links

Homepage of ''ISRA VISION PARSYTEC AG''

Ram Meenakshisundaram's Transputer Home Page
at ''classiccmp.org''
16384 Prozessoren bringen 400 Gflops Transputer-Superrechner von Parsytec als neuer Weltmeister
Article at ''computerwoche.de'' (German)
Zur Strategie von Parsytec Kuebler: "In zehn Jahren rechnen die meisten Computer parallel"
Oct 1, 1993, at computerwoche.de (German)
The FTMPS-Project: Design and Implementation of Fault-tolerance Techniques for Massively Parallel Systems
J. Vounckx et al.
Homepage of ''Via 4 Design''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Parsytec Supercomputers Massively parallel computers Parallel computing Manufacturing companies based in Aachen Computer companies of Germany