The CDC STAR-100 is a vector supercomputer that was designed, manufactured, and marketed by Control Data Corporation (CDC). It was one of the first machines to use a vector processor to improve performance on appropriate scientific applications. It was also the first supercomputer to use integrated circuits and the first to be equipped with one million words of computer memory .
67-417: STAR is a blend of ST rings (of binary digits) and AR rays. The 100 alludes to the nominal peak processing speed of 100 million floating point operations per second ( MFLOPS ); the earlier CDC 7600 provided peak performance of 36 MFLOPS but more typically ran at around 10 MFLOPS. The design was part of a bid made to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the mid-1960s. Livermore
134-426: A compound , which fully preserves the stems of the original words. The British lecturer Valerie Adams's 1973 Introduction to Modern English Word-Formation explains that "In words such as motel ..., hotel is represented by various shorter substitutes – ‑otel ... – which I shall call splinters. Words containing splinters I shall call blends". Thus, at least one of the parts of a blend, strictly speaking,
201-661: A consensus definition of a minicomputer as a machine costing less than US$ 25,000 (equivalent to $ 196,000 in 2023 ), with an input-output device such as a teleprinter and at least four thousand words of memory, that is capable of running programs in a higher level language, such as Fortran or BASIC . The class formed a distinct group with its own software architectures and operating systems. Minis were designed for control, instrumentation, human interaction, and communication switching as distinct from calculation and record keeping. Many were sold indirectly to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for final end-use application. During
268-586: A few proprietary minicomputer architectures survive. The IBM System/38 operating system, which introduced many advanced concepts, lives on with IBM's AS/400 . Great efforts were made by IBM to enable programs originally written for the IBM System/34 and System/36 to be moved to the AS/400. After being rebranded multiple times, the AS/400 platform was replaced by IBM Power Systems running IBM i . In contrast, competing proprietary computing architectures from
335-535: A form suitable for carrying on horseback; (now esp.) one in the form of a stiff leather case hinged at the back to open into two equal parts". According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language ( AHD ), the etymology of the word is the French porte-manteau , from porter , "to carry", and manteau , "cloak" (from Old French mantel , from Latin mantellum ). According to
402-455: A fraction of its theoretical performance for a number of reasons. Firstly, the vector instructions, being "memory-to-memory," had a relatively long startup time, since the pipeline from the memory to the functional units was very long. In contrast to the register-based pipelined functional units in the 7600, the STAR pipelines were much deeper. The problem was compounded by the fact that the STAR had
469-427: A kind of bath), the attributive blends of English are mostly head-final and mostly endocentric . As an example of an exocentric attributive blend, Fruitopia may metaphorically take the buyer to a fruity utopia (and not a utopian fruit); however, it is not a utopia but a drink. Coordinate blends (also called associative or portmanteau blends) combine two words having equal status, and have two heads. Thus brunch
536-470: A result, less expensive. They were used in manufacturing process control, telephone switching and to control laboratory equipment. In the 1970s, they were the hardware that was used to launch the computer-aided design (CAD) industry and other similar industries where a small dedicated system was needed. The boom in worldwide seismic exploration for oil and gas in the early 1970s saw the widespread use of minicomputers in dedicated processing centres close to
603-449: A single instruction could add two variable-length vectors of up to 65,535 elements with just one instruction fetch. The STAR also fetched vector operands in 512-bit units (superwords), reducing average memory latency. Since the memory location of the "next" operand is known, the CPU can fetch the next operands while it is operating on the previous ones. As with instruction pipelines in general,
670-416: A slower cycle time than the 7600 (40 ns vs 27.5 ns). So the vector length needed for the STAR to run faster than the 7600 occurred at about 50 elements; if the loops were working on data sets with fewer elements, the time cost of setting up the vector pipeline was higher than the time savings provided by the vector instruction(s). When the machine was released in 1974, it quickly became apparent that
737-486: A total blend, each of the words creating the blend is reduced to a mere splinter. Some linguists limit blends to these (perhaps with additional conditions): for example, Ingo Plag considers "proper blends" to be total blends that semantically are coordinate, the remainder being "shortened compounds". Commonly for English blends, the beginning of one word is followed by the end of another: Much less commonly in English,
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#1732787734805804-427: Is frankenword , an autological word exemplifying the phenomenon it describes, blending " Frankenstein " and "word". Minicomputer A minicomputer , or colloquially mini , is a type of smaller general-purpose computer developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors . In a 1970 survey, The New York Times suggested
871-477: Is a Japanese blend that has entered the English language. The Vietnamese language also encourages blend words formed from Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary . For example, the term Việt Cộng is derived from the first syllables of "Việt Nam" (Vietnam) and "Cộng sản" (communist). Many corporate brand names , trademarks, and initiatives, as well as names of corporations and organizations themselves, are blends. For example, Wiktionary , one of Misplaced Pages 's sister projects,
938-496: Is a blend of wiki and dictionary . The word portmanteau was introduced in this sense by Lewis Carroll in the book Through the Looking-Glass (1871), where Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of unusual words used in " Jabberwocky ". Slithy means "slimy and lithe" and mimsy means "miserable and flimsy". Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the practice of combining words in various ways, comparing it to
1005-440: Is both phonological and orthographic, but with no other shortening: The overlap may be both phonological and orthographic, and with some additional shortening to at least one of the ingredients: Such an overlap may be discontinuous: These are also termed imperfect blends. It can occur with three components: The phonological overlap need not also be orthographic: If the phonological but non-orthographic overlap encompasses
1072-699: Is neither a breakfasty lunch nor a lunchtime breakfast but instead some hybrid of breakfast and lunch; Oxbridge is equally Oxford and Cambridge universities. This too parallels (conventional, non-blend) compounds: an actor–director is equally an actor and a director. Two kinds of coordinate blends are particularly conspicuous: those that combine (near‑) synonyms: and those that combine (near‑) opposites: Blending can also apply to roots rather than words, for instance in Israeli Hebrew : "There are two possible etymological analyses for Israeli Hebrew כספר kaspár 'bank clerk, teller'. The first
1139-664: Is not a complete morpheme , but instead a mere splinter or leftover word fragment. For instance, starfish is a compound, not a blend, of star and fish , as it includes both words in full. However, if it were called a " stish " or a " starsh ", it would be a blend. Furthermore, when blends are formed by shortening established compounds or phrases, they can be considered clipped compounds , such as romcom for romantic comedy . Blends of two or more words may be classified from each of three viewpoints: morphotactic, morphonological, and morphosemantic. Blends may be classified morphotactically into two kinds: total and partial . In
1206-448: Is seldom used today; the contemporary term for this class of system is " midrange computer ", such as the higher-end SPARC from Oracle , Power ISA from IBM , and Itanium -based systems from Hewlett-Packard . The term "minicomputer" developed in the 1960s to describe the smaller computers that became possible with the use of transistors and core memory technologies, minimal instructions sets and less expensive peripherals such as
1273-452: Is similar to a contraction . On the one hand, mainstream blends tend to be formed at a particular historical moment followed by a rapid rise in popularity. Contractions, on the other hand, are formed by the gradual drifting together of words over time due to them commonly appearing together in sequence, such as do not naturally becoming don't (phonologically, / d uː n ɒ t / becoming / d oʊ n t / ). A blend also differs from
1340-406: Is sometimes pointed to as an early example of a minicomputer, as it was small, transistorized and (relatively) inexpensive. However, its basic price of $ 100,000 (equivalent to $ 1,029,921 in 2023) and custom desk-like chassis places it within the "small system" or "midrange computer" category as opposed to the more modern use of the term minicomputer. Nevertheless, it retains a strong contender for
1407-405: Is that it consists of (Hebrew>) Israeli כסף késef 'money' and the ( International /Hebrew>) Israeli agentive suffix ר- -ár . The second is that it is a quasi- portmanteau word which blends כסף késef 'money' and (Hebrew>) Israeli ספר √spr 'count'. Israeli Hebrew כספר kaspár started as a brand name but soon entered the common language. Even if the second analysis is the correct one,
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#17327877348051474-463: The APL programming language; in particular, the concept of "control vectors" (vector masks in modern terminology), and several instructions for vector permutation with control vectors, were carried over directly from APL. The vector instructions operated on vectors that were stored in consecutive locations in main memory; memory addressing was virtual . The vector instructions fed an arithmetic pipeline ;
1541-533: The OED Online , the etymology of the word is the "officer who carries the mantle of a person in a high position (1507 in Middle French), case or bag for carrying clothing (1547), clothes rack (1640)". In modern French, a porte-manteau is a clothes valet , a coat-tree or similar article of furniture for hanging up jackets, hats, umbrellas and the like. An occasional synonym for "portmanteau word"
1608-568: The stream unit . The stream unit accesses the main memory through the SAC via three 128-bit data buses, two for reads, and one for writes. There is also a 128-bit data bus for instruction fetch, I/O, and control vector access. The stream unit serves as the control unit, fetching and decoding instructions, initiating memory accesses on the behalf of the pipelined functional units, and controlling instruction execution, among other tasks. It also contains two read buffers and one write buffer for streaming data to
1675-566: The workstation machines opened new markets for graphics-based systems that the terminal-oriented minis could not even address. Minis retained a force for those using existing software products or those who required high-performance multitasking, but the introduction of newer operating systems based on Unix began to become highly practical replacements for these roles as well. For computational science , clusters of commodity PCs largely replaced minicomputers. Mini vendors began to rapidly disappear through this period. Data General responded to
1742-459: The 7600 to emulate the vector operations of the STAR. In the process of developing STACKLIB, they found that programs converted to use it ran faster than they had before, even on the 7600. This placed further pressures on the performance of the STAR. The STAR-100 was a disappointment to everyone involved. Jim Thornton , formerly Seymour Cray 's close assistant on the CDC 1604 and 6600 projects and
1809-466: The ASR ;33. Another common difference was that most earlier small machines were not "general purpose", in that they were designed for a specific role like process control or accounting . On these machines, programming was generally carried out in their custom machine language , or even hard-coded into a plugboard , although some used a form of BASIC . DEC wrote, regarding their PDP-5, that it
1876-432: The STAR's generally complex architecture, was implemented with microcode . Main memory had a capacity of 65,536 512-bit words , called superwords (SWORDs). Main memory was 32-way interleaved to pipeline memory accesses. It was constructed from core memory with an access time of 1.28 μs. The main memory was accessed via a 512-bit bus, controlled by the storage access controller (SAC), which handled requests from
1943-1292: The base software environment for the NonStop Servers, and has been extended to include support for Java and integration with popular development tools like Visual Studio and Eclipse . Later, Hewlett-Packard would split into HP and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. The NonStop products and the DEC products would then be sold by HPE. A variety of companies emerged that built turnkey systems around minicomputers with specialized software and, in many cases, custom peripherals that addressed specialized problems such as computer-aided design , computer-aided manufacturing , process control , manufacturing resource planning , and so on. Many if not most minicomputers were sold through these original equipment manufacturers and value-added resellers . Several pioneering computer companies first built minicomputers, such as DEC , Data General , and Hewlett-Packard (HP) (who now refers to its HP3000 minicomputers as "servers" rather than "minicomputers"). And although today's PCs and servers are clearly microcomputers physically, architecturally their CPUs and operating systems have developed largely by integrating features from minicomputers. In
2010-502: The beginning of one word may be followed by the beginning of another: Some linguists do not regard beginning+beginning concatenations as blends, instead calling them complex clippings, clipping compounds or clipped compounds . Unusually in English, the end of one word may be followed by the end of another: A splinter of one word may replace part of another, as in three coined by Lewis Carroll in " Jabberwocky ": They are sometimes termed intercalative blends; these words are among
2077-458: The changing market by focusing entirely on the high-performance file server market, embracing a role within large LANs that appeared resilient. This did not last; Novell NetWare rapidly pushed such solutions into niche roles, and later versions of Microsoft Windows did the same to Novell. DEC decided to move into the large-computer space instead, introducing the VAX 9000 mainframe in 1989, but it
CDC STAR-100 - Misplaced Pages Continue
2144-499: The chief designer of STAR, left CDC to form Network Systems Corporation . An updated version of the basic architecture was later released in 1979 as the Cyber 203 , followed by the Cyber 205 in 1980, but by this point systems from Cray Research with considerably higher performance were on the market. The failure of the STAR led to CDC being pushed from its former dominance in the supercomputer market, something they tried to address with
2211-472: The creation of an entire industry of minicomputer companies along Massachusetts Route 128 , including Data General , Wang Laboratories and Prime Computer . Other popular minis from the era were the HP 2100 , Honeywell 316 and TI-990 . Early minis had a variety of word sizes , with DEC's 12 and 18-bit systems being typical examples. The introduction and standardization of the 7-bit ASCII character set led to
2278-489: The data collection crews. Raytheon Data Systems RDS 704 and later RDS 500 were predominantly the systems of choice for nearly all the geophysical exploration as well as oil companies. At the launch of the MITS Altair 8800 in 1975, Radio Electronics magazine referred to the system as a "minicomputer", although the term microcomputer soon became usual for personal computers based on single-chip microprocessors . At
2345-485: The early 1980s, such as DEC's VAX , Wang VS , and Hewlett-Packard's HP 3000 have long been discontinued without a compatible upgrade path. OpenVMS was ported to HP Alpha and Intel IA-64 ( Itanium ) CPU architectures, and now runs on x86-64 processors. Tandem Computers , which specialized in reliable large-scale computing, was acquired by Compaq in 1997, and in 2001 the combined entity merged with Hewlett-Packard . The NonStop Kernel-based NonStop product line
2412-414: The execution units. The STAR-100 has two arithmetic pipelines. The first has a floating point adder and multiplier, and the second can execute all scalar instructions. It also contains a floating point adder, multiplier, and divider. Both pipelines are 64-bit for floating point operations and are controlled by microcode. The STAR-100 can split its floating point pipelines into four 32-bit pipelines, doubling
2479-599: The final syllable ר- -ár apparently facilitated nativization since it was regarded as the Hebrew suffix ר- -år (probably of Persian pedigree), which usually refers to craftsmen and professionals, for instance as in Mendele Mocher Sforim 's coinage סמרטוטר smartutár 'rag-dealer'." Blending may occur with an error in lexical selection , the process by which a speaker uses his semantic knowledge to choose words. Lewis Carroll's explanation, which gave rise to
2546-540: The formation of ETA Systems in September 1983. Five CDC STAR-100s were built. Deliveries started from 1974: Blend word In linguistics , a blend —also known as a blend word , lexical blend , or portmanteau —is a word formed by combining the meanings, and parts of the sounds, of two or more words together. English examples include smog , coined by blending smoke and fog , as well as motel , from motor ( motorist ) and hotel . A blend
2613-451: The general performance was disappointing. Very few programs can be effectively vectorized into a series of single instructions; nearly all calculations will rely on the results of some earlier instruction, yet the results had to clear the pipelines before they could be fed back in. This forced most programs to pay the high setup cost of the vector units, and generally the ones that did "work" were extreme examples. Worse, basic scalar performance
2680-403: The ingredients is the head and the other is attributive. A porta-light is a portable light, not a 'light-emitting' or light portability; light is the head. A snobject is a snobbery-satisfying object and not an objective or other kind of snob; object is the head. As is also true for (conventional, non-blend) attributive compounds (among which bathroom , for example, is a kind of room, not
2747-649: The later 1970s. Most mini vendors introduced their own single-chip processors based on their own architecture and used these mostly in low-cost offerings while concentrating on their 32-bit systems. Examples include the Intersil 6100 single-chip PDP-8, DEC T-11 PDP-11, microNOVA and Fairchild 9440 Nova, and TMS9900 TI-990. By the early 1980s, the 16-bit market had all but disappeared as newer 32-bit microprocessors began to improve in performance. Those customers who required more performance than these offered had generally already moved to 32-bit systems by this time. But it
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2814-423: The minicomputer class. Similar models using magnetic delay-line memory followed in the early 1960s. These machines, however, were essentially designed as small mainframes, using a custom chassis and often supporting only peripherals from the same company. In contrast, the machines that became known as minicomputers were often designed to fit into a standard chassis and deliberately designed to use common devices like
2881-533: The modern definition. Its introductory price of $ 18,500 (equivalent to $ 178,866 in 2023) places it in an entirely different market segment than earlier examples like the CDC 160. In contemporary terms, the PDP-8 was a runaway success, ultimately selling 50,000 examples. Follow-on versions using small scale integrated circuits further lowered the cost and size of the system. Its success led to widespread imitation, and
2948-495: The morphemes or phonemes stay in the same position within the syllable. Some languages, like Japanese , encourage the shortening and merging of borrowed foreign words (as in gairaigo ), because they are long or difficult to pronounce in the target language. For example, karaoke , a combination of the Japanese word kara (meaning empty ) and the clipped form oke of the English loanword "orchestra" (J. ōkesutora , オーケストラ ),
3015-496: The move to 16-bit systems, with the late-1969 Data General Nova being a notable entry in this space. By the early 1970s, most minis were 16-bit, including DEC's PDP-11 . For a time, "minicomputer" was almost synonymous with "16-bit", as the larger mainframe machines almost always used 32-bit or larger word sizes. As integrated circuit design improved, especially with the introduction of the 7400-series integrated circuits , minicomputers became smaller, easier to manufacture, and as
3082-547: The new RISC approach promised performance levels well beyond the fastest minis, and even high-end mainframes. All that really separated micros from the mini market was storage and memory capacity. Both of these began to be addressed through the later 1980s; 1 MB of RAM became typical by around 1987, desktop hard drives rapidly pushed past the 100 MB range by 1990, and the introduction of inexpensive and easily deployable local area network (LAN) systems provided solutions for those looking for multi-user systems. The introduction of
3149-495: The original "portmanteaus" for which this meaning of the word was created. In a partial blend, one entire word is concatenated with a splinter from another. Some linguists do not recognize these as blends. An entire word may be followed by a splinter: A splinter may be followed by an entire word: An entire word may replace part of another: These have also been called sandwich words, and classed among intercalative blends. (When two words are combined in their entirety,
3216-402: The peak performance of the system to 100 MFLOPS at the expense of half the precision. The STAR-100 uses I/O processors to offload I/O from the CPU. Each I/O processor is a 16-bit minicomputer with its own main memory of 65,536 words of 16 bits each, which is implemented with core memory. The I/O processors all share a 128-bit data bus to the SAC. The STAR-100's real-world performance was
3283-453: The result is considered a compound word rather than a blend. For example, bagpipe is a compound, not a blend, of bag and pipe. ) Morphologically, blends fall into two kinds: overlapping and non-overlapping . Overlapping blends are those for which the ingredients' consonants, vowels or even syllables overlap to some extent. The overlap can be of different kinds. These are also called haplologic blends. There may be an overlap that
3350-449: The same time, minis began to move upward in size. Although several 24 and 32-bit minis had entered the market earlier, it was DEC's 1977 VAX , which they referred to as a superminicomputer , or supermini, that caused the mini market to move en-masse to 32-bit architectures. This provided ample headroom even as single-chip 16-bit microprocessors like the TMS 9900 and Zilog Z8000 appeared in
3417-471: The software context, the relatively simple OSs for early microcomputers were usually inspired by minicomputer OSs (such as CP/M 's similarity to Digital's single user OS/8 and RT-11 and multi-user RSTS time-sharing system). Also, the multiuser OSs of today are often either inspired by, or directly descended from, minicomputer OSs. UNIX was originally a minicomputer OS, while the Windows NT kernel ,
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#17327877348053484-543: The term "first minicomputer". Most computing histories point to the 1964 introduction of Digital Equipment Corporation 's (DEC) 12-bit PDP-8 as the first minicomputer. Some of this is no doubt due to DEC's widespread use of the term starting in the mid-1960s. Smaller systems, including those from DEC like the PDP-5 and LINC , had existed prior to this point, but it was the PDP-8 combination of small size, general purpose orientation and low price that puts it firmly within
3551-484: The then-common type of luggage , which opens into two equal parts: You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word. In his introduction to his 1876 poem The Hunting of the Snark , Carroll again uses portmanteau when discussing lexical selection: Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take
3618-417: The time needed to complete any one instruction was no better than it was before, but since the CPU is working on a number of data points at once, the overall performance dramatically improves. Many of the STAR's instructions were complex, especially the vector macro instructions, which performed complex operations that normally would have required long sequences of instructions. These instructions, along with
3685-403: The time, microcomputers were 8-bit single-user, relatively simple machines running simple program-launcher operating systems like CP/M or MS-DOS , while minis were much more powerful systems that ran full multi-user, multitasking operating systems, such as VMS and Unix . The Tandem Computers NonStop product line shipped its first fully fault-tolerant cluster computer in 1976. Around
3752-462: The two words "fuming" and "furious". Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first … if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say "frumious". In then-contemporary English, a portmanteau was a suitcase that opened into two equal sections. According to the OED Online , a portmanteau is a "case or bag for carrying clothing and other belongings when travelling; (originally) one of
3819-468: The two-decade lifetime of the minicomputer class (1965–1985), almost 100 companies formed and only a half dozen remained. When single-chip CPU microprocessors appeared, beginning with the Intel 4004 in 1971, the term "minicomputer" came to mean a machine that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the smallest mainframe computers and the microcomputers . The term "minicomputer"
3886-505: The ubiquitous Teletype Model 33 ASR. They usually took up one or a few 19-inch rack cabinets, compared with the large mainframes that could fill a room. In terms of relative computing power compared to contemporary mainframes, small systems that were similar to minicomputers had been available from the 1950s. In particular, there was an entire class of drum machines , like the UNIVAC 1101 and LGP-30 , that share some features of
3953-406: The use of 'portmanteau' for such combinations, was: Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take the two words "fuming" and "furious." Make up your mind that you will say both words ... you will say "frumious." The errors are based on similarity of meanings, rather than phonological similarities, and
4020-542: The whole of the shorter ingredient, as in then the effect depends on orthography alone. (They are also called orthographic blends. ) An orthographic overlap need not also be phonological: For some linguists, an overlap is a condition for a blend. Non-overlapping blends (also called substitution blends) have no overlap, whether phonological or orthographic: Morphosemantically, blends fall into two kinds: attributive and coordinate . Attributive blends (also called syntactic or telescope blends) are those in which one of
4087-471: Was "the world’s first commercially produced minicomputer". It meets most definitions of "mini" in terms of power and size, but was designed and built to be used as an instrumentation system in labs, not as a general-purpose computer. Many similar examples of small special-purpose machines exist from the early 1960s, including the UK Ferranti Argus and Soviet UM-1NKh. The CDC 160 , circa 1960,
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#17327877348054154-490: Was a flop in the market and disappeared after almost no sales. The company then attempted to enter the workstation and server markets with the DEC Alpha , but was too late to save the company and they eventually sold their remains to Compaq in 1998. By the end of the decade all of the classic vendors were gone; Data General , Prime , Computervision , Honeywell , and Wang , failed, merged, or were bought out. Today, only
4221-442: Was looking for a partner who would build a much faster machine on their own budget and then lease the resulting design to the lab. It was announced publicly in the early 1970s, and on 17 August 1971, CDC announced that General Motors had placed the first commercial order for it. A number of basic design features of the machine meant that its real-world performance was much lower than expected when first used commercially in 1974, and
4288-541: Was not long before this market also began to come under threat; the Motorola 68000 offered a significant percentage of the performance of a typical mini in a desktop platform. True 32-bit processors like the National Semiconductor NS32016 , Motorola 68020 and Intel 80386 soon followed. By the mid-1980s, high-end microcomputers offered CPU performance equal to low-end and mid-range minis, and
4355-563: Was one of the primary reasons CDC was pushed from its former dominance in the supercomputer market when the Cray-1 was announced in 1975. Only three STAR-100 systems were delivered, two to LLNL and another to NASA Langley Research Center . The STAR had a 64-bit architecture , consisting of 195 instructions . Its main innovation was the inclusion of 65 vector instructions for vector processing . The operations performed by these instructions were strongly influenced by concepts and operators from
4422-417: Was re-ported from MIPS processors to Itanium-based processors branded as ' HP Integrity NonStop Servers'. As in the earlier migration from stack machines to MIPS microprocessors, all customer software was carried forward without source changes. Integrity NonStop continues to be HP's answer for the extreme scaling needs of its very largest customers. The NSK operating system, now termed NonStop OS , continues as
4489-540: Was sacrificed to improve vector performance. Any time that the program had to run scalar instructions, the overall performance of the machine dropped dramatically. (See Amdahl's Law .) Two STAR-100 systems were eventually delivered to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and one to NASA Langley Research Center . In preparation for the STAR deliveries, LLNL programmers developed a library of subroutines , called STACKLIB , on
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