Perhaps feeling that the market for graphics mini-supercomputers became overcrowded almost overnight last March, when it announced its own machine, the GS1000, within days of similar announcements from Ardent Computer and Apollo Computer, Stellar Computer Corp has decided to broaden the market potential of its basic machine by playing down the graphics and offering it in a computer server version as well. The CS1000 Computational Server is designed to bring Stellar’s Synchronous Pipeline Multi-Processor architecture, implemented on 11 gate arrays and its 1.28 Gbyte per-second DataPath dedicated highways down to the local area networked community of workstation users. Stellar sees the CS1000 being used in applications where visualisation, vectorisation and floating point performance is required, especially for distributed graphics over a local area network, where it reckons it offers the performance of a typical minisupercomputer at a quarter the price. It also sees the thing being used as a single-user supercomputer, where it could be seen as an economical alternative to buying time on a Cray or ETA machine while offering ease of programming and use. And as a multi-user system with terminals connected either by RS232 ports or a local net, it sees the machine competing directly with superminis and minisupers at a fraction of the cost per user. The box runs the Stellix implementation of Unix System V.3 with numerous Berkeley extensions, and supports X-Window System. It is rated at 25 MIPS and 8.5 MFLOPS by Stellar; prices start at $95,000 for a 16Mb CPU with 1Mb cache and 380Mb disk; delivery is 90 days.
