The Astronautics Corporation of America, better known as a manufacturer of aircraft instruments, military and space technology, has recently launched itself as a computer manufacturer. The Milwaukee, Wisconsin based firm’s entrance is interesting because it has chosen the troubled waters of the minisupercomputer environment in which to make its debut. Minisuper manufacturers have been squeezed from both sides by the encroachment of high- and low-end systems, as well as by architecture and software problems. However Astronautics president Dr Ronald Zelazo shrugs off these problems that have beset such manufacturers as Alliant Computer Systems – now recovering, Scientific Computer Systems – which has closed down its minisuper division, and the now defunct Cydrome Inc – Unlike many other entries into the minisupercomputer marketplace, Astronautics has a history of financial strength and staying power to continue state of the art development, he says. The ZS-Series is the result of a four year development project, and the two models – the ZS-1 and ZS-2 – are aimed primarily at the general scientific and engineering applications market. The 64 bit systems are based on a tightly coupled, multiprocessor design. The ZS-1 is claimed to have a performance of 45 MIPS and 22.5 MFLOPS, with from 32Mb to 1,024Mb memory. The ZS-2 is a dual processor version, and both can be expanded to take up to four CPUs. They run BSD Unix 4.3 and Sun’s Network File System, have serial, parallel, Ethernet and HyperChannel interfaces, and support C, ANSI Fortran, Pascal, Lisp and Ada. Links to IBM’s MVS and VM, and to DEC VAX/VMS are also provided; prices for the ZS Series go from $400,000 to $700,000.
