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16-547: MESM was created by a team of scientists under the direction of Sergei Alekseyevich Lebedev from the Kiev Institute of Electrotechnology in the Ukrainian SSR , at Feofaniya (near Kyiv ). Initially, MESM was conceived as a layout or model of a Large Electronic Calculating Machine and letter "M" in the title meant "model" (prototype). Work on the machine was research in nature, in order to experimentally test

32-556: A component of the Elbrus supercomputer 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

48-404: 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

64-566: A new, more powerful computer, the M-20, the number denoting its expected processing speed of twenty thousand operations per second. In 1958 the machine was accepted as operational and put into series production. Simultaneously the BESM-2, a development of the BESM-1, went into series production. Though the BESM-2 was slower than the M-20, it was more reliable. It was used to calculate satellite orbits and

80-530: Is interred at Novodevichy Cemetery . In 1996 the IEEE Computer Society recognized Sergey Lebedev with a Computer Pioneer Award for his work in the field of computer design and his founding of the Soviet computer industry. BESM-6 BESM-6 ( Russian : БЭСМ-6 , short for Большая электронно-счётная машина , i.e. 'Large Electronic Calculating Machine') was a Soviet electronic computer of

96-505: The BESM series. 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

112-623: The Kiev Electrotechnical Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, working on improving the stability of electrical systems. For this work he received the Stalin (State) prize in 1950. In 1948 Lebedev learned from foreign magazines that scientists in western countries were working on the design of electronic computers, although the details were secret. In the autumn of the same year he decided to focus

128-436: The development of the theory of "artificial stability" of electrical systems. During World War II , Lebedev worked in the field of control automation of complex systems. His group designed a weapon-aiming stabilization system for tanks and an automatic guidance system for airborne missiles. To perform these tasks Lebedev developed an analog computer system to solve ordinary differential equations. From 1946 to 1951 he headed

144-674: The electron tubes and other components left from MESM are stored in the Foundation for the History and Development of Computer Science and Technology in the Kiev House of Scientists of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The computer was built using 6000 vacuum tubes where about 3500 were triodes and 2500 were diodes . The system occupied 60 m (646 square feet ) of space and used about 25 kW of power. Data

160-529: The fields of electrical engineering and computer science , and designer of the first Soviet computers. Lebedev was born in Nizhny Novgorod , Russian Empire . He graduated from Moscow Highest Technical School in 1928. From then until 1946 he worked at All-Union Electrotechnical Institute (formerly a division of MSTU) in Moscow and Kyiv . In 1939 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Sciences for

176-438: The principles of constructing universal digital computers. After the first successes and in order to meet the extensive governmental needs of computer technology, it was decided to complete the layout of a full-fledged machine capable of " solving real problems ". MESM became operational in 1950. It had about 6,000 vacuum tubes and consumed 25 kW of power . It could perform approximately 3,000 operations per minute. Many of

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192-607: The trajectory of the first rocket to reach the surface of the Moon. Lebedev and his team developed several more computers, notably the BESM-6 , which was in production for 17 years. In 1952, Lebedev became a professor at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology . From 1953 until his death he was the director of what is now called the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering . Lebedev died in Moscow and

208-514: The work of his laboratory on computer design. Lebedev's first computer, MESM , was fully completed by the end of 1951. In April 1953 the State commission accepted the BESM-1 as operational, but it did not go into series production because of opposition from the Ministry of Machine and Instrument Building, which had developed its own weaker and less reliable machine. Lebedev then began development of

224-413: 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

240-462: 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

256-402: Was read from punched cards or typed using a plug switch. It additionally could use a magnetic drum that stored up to 5000 codes of numbers or commands. An electromechanical printer or photo device was used for output. Sergei Alekseyevich Lebedev Sergey Alekseyevich Lebedev ( Russian : Серге́й Алексе́евич Ле́бедев ; 2 November, 1902 – 3 July, 1974) was a Soviet scientist in

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