masscomp

[Dan Johnston]

     Because of the recent discussion about masscomp in this newsgroup, I
thought that there might be some interest in excerpts from an Oct. 1
newsrelease from them:

"MASSCOMP INTRODUCES INDUSTRY'S FIRST FAMILY OF MICRO SUPERCOMPUTERS..."

"MASSCOMP 5000 Family Provides Million Dollar Computing Capability for
Between $15,000 and $250,000; New Class of Computer Uses Technological
Innovations to Provide Affordable, Distributed Supercomputing
Performance..."

"Five Systems and Nine Models Offer A Wide Range of Computing
Capability..."

     "The new micro supercomputers are compatible with a wide array of
software programs used by scientific and technical users.  Two of the three
buses are "open" standards Multibus (TM) and STD+Bus (TM) (based on the
STD bus).  This makes it easy for customers to mix and match equipment for
MASSCOMP and other vendors.  Because the new micro supercomputer family's
operating system is UNIX (TM) based, an abundance of application-level
tools widely used by scientists and engineers are available.  The new micro
supercomputers work with popular technical and scientific languages such as
C, ANSI-validated FORTRAN, ANSI-validated Pascal-2 (TM), Franz LISP and
Assembler and support two of the industry's most widely accepted network
communications standards: Ethernet TCP/IP, and X.25..."

     "Key to the new micro supercomputers' power are several hardware and
software technological innovations.  These include a triple bus architecture
design that gives technical users three optimized data paths (thus more
highways to move information); a high performance floating point arithmetic
processor called "Lightning;" a two-way associative cache that speeds up
computation by managing memory references in parallel fashion and an
enhanced version of UNIX, RTU (TM) (Real-time UNIX), compatible with both
AT&T UNIX System V and Berkeley 4.2BSD..."

     "The MASSCOMP 5000 family micro supercomputers provide up to one million
samples per second data acquisition sampling rates and offer performance
ranges of .7 to 10MIPS (million instruction per second); 625,000 to over
12,000,000 Whetstones per second; and up to 13 MFLOPS (million floating
point operations per second).  These three performance measures are the
industry's most popular ways to measure computing speed..."

dan johnston
baylor college of medicine
ihnp4!shell!neuro1!dan