Newton, Massachusetts start-up Stellar Computer Inc yesterday duly introduced its Stellar Graphics Supercomputer Model GS1000, describing it as a system that offers the computational performance of a top-of-the-line minisupercomputer at less than 25% the price, coupled with a level of three-dimensional graphics capability unmatched by any workstation or terminal available today. The GS1000 has an entry price of $98,000 and is claimed to deliver 20 to 25 MIPS, 40 MFLOPS, and 150,000 Gouraud-shaded, Z-buffered polygons per second graphics performance for those up in these things. The performance is derived from an architecture that applies parallel processing, vectorising, parallelising compiler and high-bandwidth technologies. The company is pitching the 64-bit machine at mechanical computer-aided engineering, electronic computer-aided design, computational fluid dynamics, scientific research, molecular modelling and computational chemistry, animation and visual simulation, geophysical analysis and image processing. The markets are substantially the same as those targeted by Ardent Computer, but importantly, Stellar says that agreements are in place with a number of software developers in each of these areas to put their applications on the GS1000. The Stellix operating system is based Unix System V.3 with 4.3 extensions and supports vectorising and parallelising Fortran 77 with VAX, Cray and Convex extensions, and C. Network support includes Ethernet, TCP/IP and Network File System, and the GS1000 is out now selling for from $98,000.
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