Control Data Corp doesn’t have much to cheer about these days, but it will likely manage a subdued Indian Love Call – that’s the sort of noise they make up there in the frozen north, only a few hundred miles south of the Canadian border – in celebration of the sale of an ETA10-P supercomputer, worth $1.5m, to Meiji University in Tokyo. The machine is due in next month at the university’s School of Engineering, and marks the second sale of an ETA10 in Japan, the first being the rather more pricey eight processor, liquid-nitrogen-cooled ETA10-E to the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The new 8M-word uniprocessor will run the ETA System V version of Unix, and a local area network will connect it with Toshiba Corp engineering workstations (origin Sun Microsystems, no doubt) and Fuji Xerox artificial intelligence workstations. It will be used to perform scientific and engineering computations including vibration analysis of structures, simulation of phase transition from crystal to non crystal and simulation of the locus of particles. Control Data has now sold 30 ETA10s, but only seven are the high-end liquid nitrogen-cooled ones.
