The CDC Series

Abstract

In chapters 6 and 7 we followed the development of the CDC 6600 design as it evolved first into the 7600 and then into the CRAY-1. In this chapter we follow the progress of a separate line of development started by CDC in 1965 in response to a requirement of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory for a vector processor capable of executing 100 MFLOPS. The machine which resulted was the STAR-100 [HT72]. A great deal of controversy raged about this machine in its early years, and many of the essential design issues and performance goals have been obscured [Lin78]. Despite the many difficulties which arose in the course of the STAR-100 programme, CDC remained convinced that the underlying architectural concepts of the STAR-100 were sound, and went on to produce a second version, the STAR-100A, which appeared commercially as the CYBER 203, and a completely re-engineered version, the STAR-100C, which is now produced commercially as the CYBER 205. In 1983 CDC formed a spin-off company, ETA Systems Inc., with the goal of producing a multiprocessor system (the ETA¹⁰), based on the CYBER 205 architecture and having a performance capability of 10 GigaFLOPS.