Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.
Symbolics, Inc., was a privately held American computer manufacturer that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2022, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1018 FLOPS, so called exascale supercomputers. For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
The Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers sold by Thinking Machines Corporation. The idea for the Connection Machine grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computers by Danny Hillis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the early 1980s. Starting with CM-1, the machines were intended originally for applications in artificial intelligence (AI) and symbolic processing, but later versions found greater success in the field of computational science.
Meiko Scientific Ltd. was a British supercomputer company based in Bristol, founded by members of the design team working on the Inmos transputer microprocessor.
nCUBE was a series of parallel computing computers from the company of the same name. Early generations of the hardware used a custom microprocessor. With its final generations of servers, nCUBE no longer designed custom microprocessors for machines, but used server-class chips manufactured by a third party in massively parallel hardware deployments, primarily for the purposes of on-demand video.
Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the TOP500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Guy Lewis Steele Jr. is an American computer scientist who has played an important role in designing and documenting several computer programming languages and technical standards.
William Daniel Hillis is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, who pioneered parallel computers and their use in artificial intelligence. He founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a parallel supercomputer manufacturer, and subsequently was Vice President of Research and Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering.
The fat tree network is a universal network for provably efficient communication. It was invented by Charles E. Leiserson of the MIT in 1985. k-ary n-trees, the type of fat-trees commonly used in most high-performance networks, were initially formalized in 1997.
Floating Point Systems, Inc. (FPS), was a Beaverton, Oregon vendor of attached array processors and minisupercomputers. The company was founded in 1970 by former Tektronix engineer Norm Winningstad, with partners Tom Prince, Frank Bouton and Robert Carter. Carter was a salesman for Data General Corp. who persuaded Bouton and Prince to leave Tektronix to start the new company. Winningstad was the fourth partner.
NEC SX describes a series of vector supercomputers designed, manufactured, and marketed by NEC. This computer series is notable for providing the first computer to exceed 1 gigaflop, as well as the fastest supercomputer in the world between 1992–1993, and 2002–2004. The current model, as of 2018, is the SX-Aurora TSUBASA.
*Lisp is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp. It was conceived of in 1985 by two employees of the Thinking Machines Corporation, Cliff Lasser and Steve Omohundro, as a way to provide an efficient yet high-level language for programming the nascent Connection Machine (CM).
MasPar Computer Corporation was a minisupercomputer vendor that was founded in 1987 by Jeff Kalb. The company was based in Sunnyvale, California.
The VLSI Project was a DARPA-program initiated by Robert Kahn in 1978 that provided research funding to a wide variety of university-based teams in an effort to improve the state of the art in microprocessor design, then known as Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI).
EPCC, formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, is a supercomputing centre based at the University of Edinburgh. Since its foundation in 1990, its stated mission has been to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing throughout industry, academia and commerce.
In computing, the term data warehouse appliance (DWA) was coined by Foster Hinshaw for a computer architecture for data warehouses (DW) specifically marketed for big data analysis and discovery that is simple to use and has a high performance for the workload. A DWA includes an integrated set of servers, storage, operating systems, and databases.
Encore Computer Corporation was an American computer company independently active from 1983 to 1997. Based in Marlborough, Massachusetts, the company was an early pioneer in the parallel computing market. Although offering several system designs beginning in 1985, Encore was never as well known as other companies in this field such as Pyramid Technology, Alliant, and the most similar systems Sequent and FLEX.
Isra Vision Parsytec AG, a subsidiary of Isra Vision, was originally founded in 1985 as Parsytec in Aachen, Germany.
Lewis Wiley Tucker is an American computer scientist, open source advocate, and industry executive spanning several decades of technology innovation. As an early proponent of internet technologies, he held executive-level positions at Sun Microsystems, Salesforce.com, and Cisco Systems contributing to the advancement of the Java programming language and platform, the AppExchange on-demand application marketplace, and the OpenStack cloud computing platform.
Thinking Machines CM-1 at Computer History Museum. See also a detailed photo.
Thinking Machines CM-2 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. One of the face plates is partly removed to show the circuit boards inside.
Thinking Machines CM-200 at the Bolo Computer Museum at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne.
