The ETA10 is a vector supercomputer designed, manufactured, and marketed by ETA Systems, a spin-off division of Control Data Corporation (CDC). The ETA10 was an evolution of the CDC Cyber 205, which can trace its origins back to the CDC STAR-100, one of the first vector supercomputers to be developed.
CDC announced it was creating ETA Systems, and a successor to the Cyber 205, on 18 April 1983 at the Frontiers of Supercomputing conference, held at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It was then referred to tentatively as the Cyber 2XX, and later as the GF-10, before it was named the ETA10. Prototypes were operational in mid-1986, and the first delivery was made in December 1986. The supercomputer was formally announced in April 1987 at an event held at its first customer installation, the Florida State University, Tallahassee's Scientific Computational Research Institute. On 17 April 1989, CDC abruptly closed ETA Systems due to ongoing financial losses, and discontinued production of the ETA10. Many of its users, such as Florida State University, negotiated Cray hardware in exchange.
Historical development
CDC had a strong history of creating powerful supercomputers, starting with the CDC 6600. One of the most famous computer architects to emerge from CDC was Seymour Cray. After a disagreement with CDC management regarding the development of the CDC 8600, he went on to form his own supercomputer company, Cray Research. Meanwhile, work continued at CDC in developing a high-end supercomputer, the CDC STAR-100—led by another famous architect, Neil Lincoln. Cray Research's Cray-1 vector supercomputer was successful, beating CDC's STAR-100. CDC responded with derivatives of the STAR, the Cyber 203 and 205. The Cyber 205 was moderately successful against the Cray-1's successor, the Cray X-MP. It became apparent to CDC's top management that it needed to decrease the development time for the next generation computer—thus a new approach was considered for the follow-on to the Cyber 205.
After spinning off from CDC in September 1983, ETA set a goal of producing a supercomputer with a cycle time less than 10ns. To accomplish this, several innovations were made. Among these was the use of liquid nitrogen for cooling the CMOS-based CPUs.
The ETA10 successfully met the company's initial goals (10 GFLOPS), with some models achieving a cycle time of about 7 ns (143 MHz) - considered rapid by mid-1980s standards. They delivered seven liquid nitrogen-cooled versions and 27 smaller, air-cooled versions. The CMOS circuits produced only a fraction of the heat of previous ICs. The planned 1987 follow-on was supposed to be designated Cyber 250 or ETA30, as in 30 GFLOPS. ETA was eventually reincorporated back into CDC, ceasing operations on April 17, 1989.
Operating systems and applications
The ETA10 series could run either ETA's EOS operating system, which was widely criticized for various problems, or a port by Lachman Associates, a software personnel firm, of UNIX System V (Release 3). While EOS suffered a reputation for poor quality, ETA's UNIX was better received by customers.
EOS was preceded by and was binary executable compatible with the CDC VSOS operating system for Cyber 205. Like VSOS, EOS had demand paged virtual memory (the VS part) with 2 page sizes for improved virtual memory performance with the ETA's faster hardware pipelines. Though it had roots in the interactive Livermore Time Sharing System (LTSS), VSOS was focused as a batch-oriented operating system. VSOS was not run at very many institutions and its application-oriented performance, while the historic focus for supercomputing, set its features behind the times because of its limited user base.
To address this feature deficiency and to make the operating system more "normal to use", the VSOS characteristics were married with UNIX characteristics in a hybrid OS. The OS was intended to be effective for both batch work that drove the hardware to its maximum or for interactive use in development from a UNIX workstation.
EOS was written mainly in Cybil, a Pascal-like programming language created by Control Data for its later Cyber operating systems. It was a new effort, as VSOS was implemented in IMPL, a Fortran-like language created for the LTSS implementation. The command line appearance of all these systems was similar to the lineage going back to UNIVAC EXEC*8.
EOS was released with early hardware deliveries and had some of the typical problems for early OS releases. Some customers delayed payment for their supercomputer installations.