- minisupercomputer
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A computer capable of vector processing and small-scale multiprocessing, a cheaper alternative to a full supercomputer in the 1980s.
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minisupercomputer
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Minisupercomputer — Not to be confused with superminicomputer. Minisupercomputers constituted a short lived class of computers that emerged in the mid 1980s. As scientific computing using vector processors became more popular, the need for lower cost systems that… … Wikipedia
Multiflow — Computer, Inc. , founded in April, 1984 near New Haven, Connecticut, USA, was a manufacturer and seller of minisupercomputer hardware and software embodying the VLIW design style. Multiflow, incorporated in Delaware, ended operations in March,… … Wikipedia
Floating Point Systems — Inc. (FPS) was a Beaverton, Oregon vendor of minisupercomputers. The company was founded in 1970 by former Tektronix engineer Norm Winningstad.The original goal of the company was to supply floating point coprocessors for minicomputers. In 1976,… … Wikipedia
MasPar — at NASA/GSFC MasPar Computer Corporation was a minisupercomputer vendor that was founded in 1987 by Jeff Kalb. The company was based in Sunnyvale, California. While Kalb was the Vice President of DEC s VLSI chip building division, some… … Wikipedia
Very long instruction word — or VLIW refers to a CPU architecture designed to take advantage of instruction level parallelism (ILP). A processor that executes every instruction one after the other (i.e. a non pipelined scalar architecture) may use processor resources… … Wikipedia
Vector processor — A vector processor, or array processor, is a CPU design where the instruction set includes operations that can perform mathematical operations on multiple data elements simultaneously. This is in contrast to a scalar processor which handles one… … Wikipedia
Convex Computer — Corporation was a company that developed, manufactured and marketed vector minisupercomputers and supercomputers for small to medium sized businesses. Their later Exemplar series of parallel computing machines were based on the Hewlett Packard… … Wikipedia
64-bit — CPUs have existed in supercomputers since the 1960s and in RISC based workstations and servers since the early 1990s. In 2003 they were introduced to the (previously 32 bit) mainstream personal computer arena, in the form of the x86 64 and 64 bit … Wikipedia
Superminicomputer — A superminicomputer, or supermini, is, by definition, “a minicomputer with high performance compared to ordinary minicomputers.” The term was an invention used from the mid 1970s mainly to distinguish the emerging 32 bit minis from the classical… … Wikipedia
ETA Systems — was a supercomputer company spun off from Control Data Corporation (CDC) in the early 1980s in order to regain a footing in the supercomputer business. They successfully delivered an excellent machine, the ETA 10, but lost money continually while … Wikipedia
