Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp has overcome the chip problems at its two suppliers of custom parts that threatened its entry into the supercomputer business and as we closed for press was preparing to launch and demonstrate the ES-1 – the first supercomputer to come out of Silicon Valley. The company had to put back the launch after problems with custom chips being fabricated by Control Data’s VTC Inc and by VLSI Technology Inc, necessitating reinforcements from Hewlett-Packard Co and National Semiconductor to lend a hand (CI No 1,052). The machine was originally designed to run the Mach parallel implementation of Unix developed at Carnegie Mellon University, but has now reportedly been switched to Berkeley Unix 4.3, and is optimised for complex real world modelling and simulation problems. In maximum configuration, it comes with eight processor complexes, each consisting of up to 16 computational units, each unit claimed to deliver half the power of an IBM 3090-180 in scientific work – Evans rates it at 1,600 MIPS and 1,600 MFLOPS in scalar performance, and it can have up to 2,048Mb of main memory and up to 450Gb disk. Described as moderately parallel, it uses scalar rather than vector processing, and is designed to support workstations in an interactive environment. For delivery later this quarter, a system with two processing complexes costs $2.2m, and one with eight is around $8m. It will be announced for Europe in West Germany today.
