BESM-6 ( Russian : БЭСМ-6 , short for Большая электронно-счётная машина , i.e. 'Large Electronic Calculating Machine') was a Soviet electronic computer of the BESM series.
6-528: The BESM-6 was the most well-known and influential model of the series designed at the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering . The design was completed in 1965. Production started in 1968 and continued for the following 19 years. Like its BESM-3 and BESM-4 predecessors, the original BESM-6 was transistor-based (however, the version used in the 1980s as a component of the Elbrus supercomputer
12-456: A new computer complex which was based on a BESM-6. The Apollo-Soyuz mission's data processing by Soviet scientists finished half an hour earlier than their American colleagues from NASA . A total of 355 of these machines were built. Production ended in 1987. As the first Soviet computer with an installed base that was large for the time, the BESM-6 gathered a dedicated developer community. Over
18-411: The years several operating systems and compilers for programming languages such as Fortran , ALGOL and Pascal were developed. A modification of the BESM-6 based on integrated circuits, with 2-3 times higher performance than the original machine, was produced in the 1980s under the name Elbrus-1K2 as a component of the Elbrus supercomputer . In 1992, one of the last surviving BESM-6 machines
24-462: Was word-addressable using 15-bit addresses. The maximum addressable memory space was thus 32K words (192 K bytes ). A virtual memory system allowed to expand this up to 128K words (768 K bytes ). The BESM-6 was widely used in USSR in the 1970s for various computation and control tasks. During the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project the processing of the space mission telemetry data was accomplished by
30-407: Was built with integrated circuits ). The machine's 48-bit processor ran at 10 MHz clock speed and featured two instruction pipelines , separate for the control and arithmetic units , and a data cache of sixteen 48-bit words. The system achieved a performance of 1 MIPS . The CDC 6600 , a common Western supercomputer when the BESM-6 was released, achieved about 2 MIPS. The system memory
36-823: Was purchased by the Science Museum in London, England . The BESM-6 could send output to an АЦПУ-128 (Алфавитно-Цифровое Печатающее Устройство) printer, and read input from punched cards in the GOST 10859 character set . A Consul-254 teletype , made by Zbrojovka Brno in Czechoslovakia , could be used for interactive sessions. When CRT terminals became available, the BESM-6 could be connected to Videoton 340 terminals. Lebedev Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering Lebedev Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering (IPMCE)
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