Specialized supercomputer manufacturers are now a thing of the past, but in 1987, when Seattle, Washington-based Tera Computer Company was founded, the likes of Cray Research,Thinking Machines, Kendall Square and Supercomputer Systems Inc were all still going strong. Tera, now all on its own, is finally about to launch a prototype of its MTA Multithreaded Architecture scaleable symmetric multiprocessor, according to the Seattle Times. Within two weeks, a 700-plus processor prototype will be fired up, hears the paper, with a view to having its first systems shipped early next year. Prices will start from $12m. Founded by supercomputer gurus Jim Rottsolk and Burton Smith, Tera has gone through some $33m of funding since 1987, $18m of which came from the US Government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Another $9m came from an initial public offering in September 1995, and a further $8m from a private placement in July 1996. Tera claims that it’s architecture delivers three to ten times the performance of typical supercomputers, and can run existing Cray and Unix code with little alteration. It has a shared memory design, automatic parallelizing compilers, and avoids cacheing problems through using multithreaded processors that tolerate latency. While waiting for data required for one computation, a Tera processor continues with other computations. Unisys Corp’s Advanced Development and Manufacturing Services division is making the company’s turnkey ASIC components and computer systems, with Axiom Electronics providing complex printed circuit assembly services to Unisys ADMS. Target markets include complex simulations, seismic analysis, advanced computer-aided design, computational chemistry and weather prediction . Tera has 63 employees, 90% of them engineers. But don’t hold your breath: for years Tera was claiming it would launch its first systems in 1993, and only last April the company was promising Computergram that the MTA would be out in no more than a couple of months (CI No 2,889).
