We’ve had three exceptional months here at Multiflow, says a euphoric Donald Eckdahl, president and chief executive of the infant Branford, Connecticut-based parallel process-or builder Multiflow Computer Inc. We opened the quarter with our first delivery of a production machine, launched our partnership with Apollo Computer Inc, established strong distribution ties in Western Europe, and opened four new sales and service centres in the United States. But more than all that, the company delivered five of its Trace 7/200 very long instruction word supercomputers during the third quarter 1987, which was its first quarter of customer shipments. The early customers will be using their Traces in a wide range of engineering and scientific applications. Motorola Inc’s semiconductor products division in Mesa, Arizona is using the Trace in a variety of electronic design applications. The group’s work includes basic process and device technology development for bipolar and BIMOS – combined bipolar and CMOS – integrated circuits. At Williams International Inc, a manufacturer of gas turbine engines based in Walled Lake, Michigan, the Trace is running third party finite element analysis programs to model the stress and heat transfer properties of components used in the company’s products. Computer Aided Engineering Associates Inc is an engineering consulting firm based in Woodbury, Connecticut, which specialises in the design and analysis of mechanical systems and is using the Trace for both its contract work and as a time-shared system for its clients. At the Yale University Computer Science Department in New Haven, Connecticut, the Trace is being used in several areas of research, including the investigation of new algorithms in numerical analysis, neural network simulation, fluid dynamics, wave propagation, CAD/CAM and many-body problems. At the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia – that’s right, the establishment from whence the unabashed regular wreck emanates – the Trace is being used primarily by the electrical engineering department’s digital signal processing laboratory. Multiflow Computer Inc, founded in 1984, has received a hefty $35.6m in three financing rounds. The company’s Trace systems incorporate what it reckons is a fundamentally new computer architecture and software technology – Very Long Instruction Word architecture and Trace Scheduling compacting compilers. The latter automatically compacts operations for simultaneous ex-ecution into very long instruction words from standard Fortran and C programs. As a result, Trace systems deliver extraordinary price/performance and ease of use surpassing that of currently available parallel, multiprocessor and vector computers. The entry level Trace 7/200 packs seven operations into a 256 bit long instruction word for $300,000.
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