The
CDC Cyber range of
mainframeMainframes are computers used mainly by large organizations for critical applications, typically bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term probably had originated from the early mainframes, as...
-class
supercomputerA supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s and were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation , and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form...
s were the primary products of
Control Data CorporationControl Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....
(CDC) during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing. Applications include modeling fluid flow, material science stress analysis, electrochemical machining analysis, probabilistic analysis, energy and academic computing, and radiation shielding modeling.
Models
The Cyber line included five very different models of computer:
- The 70 and 170 series based on the architecture of the CDC 6600
The CDC 6600 was a mainframe computer from Control Data Corporation, first delivered in 1964. It is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor, IBM 7030 Stretch, by about three times...
and CDC 7600The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 had a 27.5 ns clock cycle and a 65 Kword primary memory using core and variable-size secondary memory . It was generally about ten times as...
- The 180 series developed by a team in Canada
- The 200 series based on the CDC STAR-100
The STAR-100 was a supercomputer from Control Data Corporation , one of the first machines to use a vector processor for improved math performance....
- The CYBERPLUS or Advanced Flexible Processor (AFP)
- The Cyber-18 minicomputer based on the CDC 1700
The CDC 1700 was a 16-bit word minicomputer, manufactured by the Control Data Corporation with deliveries beginning in May, 1966. The 1700 used ones complement arithmetic and an ASCII-based character set, and supported memory write protection on an individual word basis...
Primarily aimed at large office applications instead of the traditional supercomputer tasks, some of the Cyber machines nevertheless included basic
vector instructionsA vector processor, or array processor, is a CPU design wherein the instruction set includes operations that can perform mathematical operations on multiple data elements simultaneously. This is in contrast to a scalar processor, which handles one element at a time using multiple instructions. The...
for added performance in "traditional" CDC roles.
CDC Cyber 70 and 170 series
The Cyber 70 and 170 architectures were successors to the earlier
CDC 6600The CDC 6600 was a mainframe computer from Control Data Corporation, first delivered in 1964. It is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor, IBM 7030 Stretch, by about three times...
and
CDC 7600The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 had a 27.5 ns clock cycle and a 65 Kword primary memory using core and variable-size secondary memory . It was generally about ten times as...
series and therefore shared almost all of the earlier architecture's characteristics. The Cyber-70 series was a minor upgrade from the earlier systems. The Cyber-170 series represented CDCs move from discrete electronic components and core memory to integrated circuits and
semiconductor memorySemiconductor memory is an electronic data storage device, often used as computer memory, implemented on a semiconductor-based integrated circuit. Examples of semiconductor memory include non-volatile memory such as Read-only memory , magnetoresistive random access memory , and flash memory...
. The Cyber-170/700 series was a late-1970s refresh of the Cyber-170 line.
The central
processorThe Central Processing Unit or processor is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, and is the primary element carrying out the computer's functions. This term has been in use in the computer industry at least since the early 1960s...
(CPU) and central memory (CM) operated in units of 60-bit words. In CDC lingo, the term "byte" referred to 12-bit entities (which coincided with the word size used by the peripheral processors). Characters were six bits, operation codes were six bits, and central memory addresses were 18 bits. Central processor instructions were either 15 bits or 30 bits.
The 18-bit addressing inherent to the Cyber 170 series imposed a limit of 262,144 (256K) words of main memory, which was
semiconductorA semiconductor is a material that has an electrical resistivity between that of a conductor and an insulator, that is, generally in the range 10
3 Siemens/cm to 10
−8 S/cm. Devices made from semiconductor materials are the foundation of modern electronics, including radio,...
memory in this series. The central processor had no I/O instructions, relying upon the peripheral processor (PP) units to do I/O.
A Cyber 170-series system consisted of one or two
CPUsThe Central Processing Unit or processor is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, and is the primary element carrying out the computer's functions. This term has been in use in the computer industry at least since the early 1960s...
that ran at either 25 or 40 MHz, and was equipped with 10, 14 or 20 peripheral processors (PP), and up to 24 high-performance channel controllers for high-speed
I/OI/O may refer to:* Input/output, a system of communication for information processing systems* The input-output model, an economic model of flow prediction between sectors...
. Due to the relatively slow memory reference times of the CPU (in some models, memory reference instructions were slower than floating point divides), the higher end CPUs (e.g., Cyber-74, Cyber-76, Cyber-175, and Cyber-176) were equipped with 8 words of high-speed memory used as an instruction cache. Any loop that fit into the cache (which was sometimes called
in-stack) would run without referencing main memory for instruction fetch. The lower-end models did not contain an instruction stack. However since up to four instructions were packed into each 60-bit word, some degree of prefetching was inherent in the design.
As with predecessor systems, the Cyber 170 series had eight 18-bit address
registersIn computer architecture, a processor register is a small amount of storage available on the CPU whose contents can be accessed more quickly than storage available elsewhere. Most, but not all, modern computers adopt the so-called load-store architecture...
(A0 through A7), eight 18-bit index registers (B0 through B7), and eight 60-bit operand registers (X0 through X7). Seven of the A registers were tied to their corresponding X register. Setting A1 through A5 read that address and fetched it into the corresponding X1 through X5 register. Likewise, setting register A6 or A7 wrote the corresponding X6 or X7 register to central memory at the address written to the A register. A0 was effectively a scratch register.
The higher end CPUs consisted of multiple
functional unitsIn computer engineering, an execution unit is a part of a CPU that performs the operations and calculations called for by the computer program...
(e.g., shift, increment, floating add) which allowed some degree of parallel execution of instructions. This parallelism allowed assembly programmers to minimize the effects of the system's slow memory fetch time by
pre-fetching data from central memory well before that data was needed. By interleaving independent instructions between the memory fetch instruction and the instructions manipulating the fetched operand, the time occupied by the memory fetch could be used for other computation. With this technique, coupled with the handcrafting of tight loops that fit within the instruction stack, a skilled Cyber assembly programmer could write extremely efficient code that made the most of the power of the hardware.
The peripheral processor subsystem used a technique known as
barrel and slot to share the execution unit; each PP had its own memory and registers, but the processor (the slot) itself executed one instruction from each PP in turn (the barrel). This is a crude form of hardware
multiprogrammingComputer multiprogramming is the allocation of a computer system and its resources to more than one concurrent application, job or user ....
. The peripheral processors had 4096 bytes of 12-bit memory words and an 18-bit accumulator register. Each PP had access to all
I/OI/O may refer to:* Input/output, a system of communication for information processing systems* The input-output model, an economic model of flow prediction between sectors...
channels and all of the system's central memory (CM) in addition to the PP's own memory. The PP instruction set lacked, for example, extensive arithmetic capabilities and did not run user code; the peripheral processor subsystem's purpose was to process I/O and thereby free the more powerful central processor unit(s) to running user computations.
A feature of the 'lower Cyber' CPUs was the
Compare Move Unit (CMU). It provided four additional instructions intended to aid text processing applications. In an unusual departure from the rest of the 15- and 30-bit instructions, these were 60-bit instructions (3 actually used all 60 bits, the other used 30 bits, but its alignment required 60 bits to be used). The instructions were move a short string, move a long string, compare strings, and compare a collated string. They operated on 6-bit fields (numbered 1 through 10) in central memory. For example, a single instruction could specify "move the 72 character string starting at word 1000 character 3 to location 2000 character 9". The CMU hardware was not included in the higher-end Cyber CPUs, because handcoded loops could run as fast or faster than the CMU instructions.
Later systems typically ran CDC's
NOSNOS was an operating system with time-sharing capabilities, written by Control Data Corporation in the 1970s....
(Network Operating System). Version 1 of NOS continued to be updated until about 1981; NOS version 2 was released early 1982. Besides NOS, the only other operating systems commonly used on the 170 series was
NOS/BE or its predecessor
SCOPE, a product of CDC's Sunnyvale division. These operating systems provided time sharing of batch and interactive applications. The predecessor to NOS was
KRONOSKRONOS is an operating system with time-sharing capabilities, written by Control Data Corporation in the 1970s. KRONOS ran on the 60-bit CDC 6000 series mainframe computers and their successors. CDC replaced KRONOS with the NOS operating system in the late 1970s.The MACE operating system was the...
which was in common use up until 1975 or so. Due to the strong dependency of developed applications on the particular installation's character set, many installations chose to run the older operating systems than convert their applications. Other installations would patch newer versions of the operating system to use the older character set to maintain application compatibility.
Desktop CYBERDesktop CYBER accurately emulates a range of Control Data Corporation CYBER mainframes and peripherals in software.-History:...
emulates CDC Cyber 70 and 170 series mainframes in software running on modern desktop PCs.
CDC Cyber 180 series
As the computing world standardized to an eight-bit
byteA byte is a unit of information storage representing the smallest addressable element for a given computer architecture. It often designates a sequence of bits whose length is determined by the architecture...
size, CDC customers started pushing for the Cyber machines to do the same. The result was a new series of systems that could operate in both 60- and 64-bit modes. The
64-bit64-bit CPUs have existed in supercomputers since the 1960s and in RISC-based workstations and servers since the early 1990s. In 2003 they were introduced to the mainstream personal computer arena, in the form of the x86-64 and 64-bit PowerPC processor architectures.Without further qualification, a...
operating system was called NOS/VE, and supported the
virtual memoryVirtual memory is a computer system technique which gives an application program the impression that it has contiguous working memory , while in fact it may be physically fragmented and may even overflow on to disk storage. Systems that use this technique make programming of large applications...
capabilities of the hardware. The older 60-bit operating systems,
NOSNOS was an operating system with time-sharing capabilities, written by Control Data Corporation in the 1970s....
and NOS/BE, could run in a special address space for compatibility with the older systems.
The true 180-mode machines were microcoded processors that could, and did, support both instruction sets simultaneously. Their hardware was completely different from the earlier 6000/70/170 machines. The small 170-mode exchange package was mapped into the much larger 180-mode exchange package; within the 180-mode exchange package, there was a VMID—virtual machine identifier—that determined whether the 8/16/64-bit twos complement 180 instruction set or the 12/60-bit ones complement 170 instruction set was executed.
There were 3 true 180s in the initial lineup, codenamed P1, P2, P3. P2 & P3 were larger water-cooled designs from Arden Hills. The P1 was a novel air-cooled, 60-board cabinet designed by a group in Mississauga, Ontario; the P1 ran on 60 Hz current (no motor-generator sets needed). A fourth high-end 180 codenamed THETA was also under development.
The 180s were initially marketed as 170/8xx machines with no mention of the new 8/64-bit system inside. However, the primary control program was a 180-mode program known as EI (Environmental Interface). The 170 operating system (NOS) utilized a single, large, fixed page within the main memory. There were a few clues that an alert user could pick up on, such as the "building page tables" message that flashed on the operator's console at startup and deadstart panels with 16 (instead of 12) toggle switches per PP word on the P2 & P3.
The peripheral processors in the true 180s were always 16-bit machines with the sign bit determining whether a 16/64 bit or 12/60 bit PP instruction was being executed. The single word I/O instructions in the PPs were always 16-bit instructions, so at deadstart the PPs could set up the proper environment to run both EI plus NOS and the customer's existing 170-mode software. To hide this process from the customer, earlier in the 1980s CDC had ceased distribution of the source code for its DDS (Deadstart Diagnostic Sequence) package and turned it into the proprietary CTI (Common Tests & Initialization) package.
The initial 170/800 lineup was: 170/825 (P1), 170/835 (P2), 170/855 (P3), 170/865 and 170/875. The 825 was released initially after some delay loops had been added to its microcode; it seemed the design folks in Toronto had done a little too well and it was too close to the P2 in performance. The 865 and 875 models were revamped 170/760 heads (1 or 2 processors with 6600/7600-style parallel functional units) with larger memories. The 865 used normal 170 memory; the 875 took its faster main processor memory from the
Cyber 205 line.
A year or two after the initial release, CDC announced the 800-series' true capabilities to its customers, and the true 180s were relabeled as the 180/825 (P1), 180/835 (P2), and 180/855 (P3). At some point the model 815 was introduced with the delayed microcode and the faster microcode was restored to the model 825. Eventually the THETA was released as the
Cyber 990.
CDC Cyber 200 series
In 1974 CDC introduced the
STARThe STAR-100 was a supercomputer from Control Data Corporation , one of the first machines to use a vector processor for improved math performance....
architecture. The STAR was an entirely new 64-bit design with
virtual memoryVirtual memory is a computer system technique which gives an application program the impression that it has contiguous working memory , while in fact it may be physically fragmented and may even overflow on to disk storage. Systems that use this technique make programming of large applications...
and
vector processingA vector processor, or array processor, is a CPU design wherein the instruction set includes operations that can perform mathematical operations on multiple data elements simultaneously. This is in contrast to a scalar processor, which handles one element at a time using multiple instructions. The...
instructions added for high performance on a certain class of math tasks. The STAR's vector pipeline was a
memory to memory pipe, which supported vector lengths of up to 65,536 elements. Unfortunately, the latencies of the vector pipeline were very long, so peak speed was approached only when very long vectors were used. The scalar processor was relatively slow in comparison to the
CDC 7600The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 had a 27.5 ns clock cycle and a 65 Kword primary memory using core and variable-size secondary memory . It was generally about ten times as...
. As such, the original STAR proved to be a great disappointment when it was released (see
Amdahl's LawAmdahl's law, also known as Amdahl's argument, is named after computer architect Gene Amdahl, and is used to find the maximum expected improvement to an overall system when only part of the system is improved...
). However many of its problems seemed solvable.
In the late 1970s, CDC addressed some of these issues with the
Cyber 203. The new name kept with their new branding, and perhaps to distance itself from the STAR's failure. The Cyber 203 contained redesigned scalar processing and
loosely coupled I/O design, but retained the STAR's vector pipeline.
In 1979, the
Cyber 205 replaced the STAR vector pipeline with redesigned vector pipelines: both scalar and vector units utilized
ECLECL may stand for:*ECL programming language, an extensible programming language developed at Harvard*Eastern Counties League, a football league in East Anglia, England*Ecolab, a sanitation supply company whose NYSE ticker symbol is ECL...
IC technology with
freonFreon is DuPont's trade name for chlorofluorocarbon and hydrochlorofluorocarbons. In other countries the same family of chemical compounds are called Isceon, Ledon, Frigen, Kaltron, Flugene, Forane, Fridohna, Frigedohn, Algofrene, Asahiflon, Daiflon, Flon, Genetron, Kaiser, Isotron, Racon, Ucon,...
cooling. Cyber 205 systems were available with two or four vector pipelines, with the 4-pipe version theoretically delivering 400 64-bit MFLOPs and 800 32-bit MFLOPs. These speeds were rarely seen in practice other than by handcrafted
assembly languageAssembly languages are a family of low-level languages for programming computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other integrated circuits. They implement a symbolic representation of the numeric machine codes and other constants needed to program a particular CPU architecture...
. The ECL ICs contained 20 to 30 gates of logic, with the clock tree networks being tuned by hand-crafted coax length adjustment. It is worth noting that the instruction set would be considered V-
CISCA complex instruction set computer is a computer instruction set architecture in which each instruction can execute several low-level operations, such as a load from memory, an arithmetic operation, and a memory store, all in a single instruction...
(very complex instruction set) among modern processors. Many specialized operations facilitated hardware searches, matrix mathematics, and special instructions that would enable decryption. This architecture evolved into the
ETA10The ETA10 was a line of supercomputers manufactured by ETA Systems in the 1980s and which implemented the instruction set of the CDC Cyber 205.-Historical development:...
as the design team spun off into
ETA SystemsETA Systems was a supercomputer company spun-off from Control Data Corporation in the early 1980s in order to regain a footing in the supercomputer business. They successfully delivered an excellent machine, the ETA-10, but lost money continually while doing so...
in 1983.
Also there was a Cyber 250 which was scheduled for release in 1987 priced at $20 million; it was later renamed the ETA30 after ETA Systems was absorbed back into CDC.
CDC Cyberplus/AFP
At least 21 CYBERPLUS (aka Advanced Flexible Processor, AFP)
multiprocessorMultiprocessing is the use of two or more central processing units within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor and/or the ability to allocate tasks between them...
installations were operational in 1986. These Parallel Processing Systems include from 1 to 256 CYBERPLUS processors providing 250 MFLOPS each, which are connected to an existing CYBER system via a direct memory interconnect architecture (MIA), this was available on NOS 2.2 for the CYBER 170/835, 845, 855 and 180/990 models. Each CYBERPLUS is a 16-bit processor with optional 64-bit floating point capabilities and has 256 K or 512 K words of 64-bit memory.
Each physical CYBERPLUS processor unit was:
- 348 cm wide (465 cm with floating point unit)
- 161 cm deep
- 490 cm high
- 1000 kg weight
Software that was bundled with the CYBERPLUS was:
- system software
- FORTRAN cross compiler
- MICA (Machine Instruction Cross Assember)
- Load File Builder Utility
- ECHOS (simulator)
- Debug facility
- Dump utility
- Dump analyzer utility
- Maintenance software
Some sites using the CYBERPLUS were the
University of GeorgiaThe University of Georgia is a public research university located in Athens, Georgia, the oldest and largest of the state's institutions of higher learning. Founded in 1785, UGA claims to be the oldest public university in the United States....
and Gesellschaft fur Trendanalysen (GFTA) in Germany.
A fully configured 256 processor CYBERPLUS system would have a theoretical performance of 64 GFLOPS and would weigh 256 tonnes.
Cyber 18
The Cyber 18 was a 16-bit minicomputer which was a successor to the
CDC 1700The CDC 1700 was a 16-bit word minicomputer, manufactured by the Control Data Corporation with deliveries beginning in May, 1966. The 1700 used ones complement arithmetic and an ASCII-based character set, and supported memory write protection on an individual word basis...
minicomputer. It was mostly used in real-time environments. One noteworthy application is as the basis of the 2550 - a communications processor used by
CDC 6000 seriesThe CDC 6000 series was a family of mainframe computers manufactured by Control Data Corporation in the 1960s. It consisted of CDC 6400, CDC 6500, CDC 6600 and CDC 6700 computers, which all were extremely rapid and efficient for their time...
and Cyber 70/Cyber 170 mainframes. The 2550 was a product of CDC's Communications Systems Division, in Santa Ana, California (STAOPS). STAOPS also produced another communication processor (CP), used in networks hosted by IBM mainframes. This M1000 CP, later renamed C1000, came from an acquisition of Marshall MDM Communications.
The Cyber 18 was generally programmed in
PascalPascal is an influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968/9 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.A derivative known as Object Pascal...
and
assembly languageAssembly languages are a family of low-level languages for programming computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other integrated circuits. They implement a symbolic representation of the numeric machine codes and other constants needed to program a particular CPU architecture...
;
FORTRANFortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
,
BASICIn computer programming, BASIC is a family of high-level programming languages. The original BASIC was designed in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth in New Hampshire, USA to provide computer access to non-science students...
, and RPG II were also available. Operating systems included RTOS (Real-Time Operating System), MSOS 5 (Mass Storage Operating System), and
TIMESHAREA timeshare is a form of ownership or right to the use of a property, or the term used to describe such properties. These properties are typically resort condominium units, in which multiple parties hold rights to use the property, and each sharer is allotted a period of time in which they may use...
3 (
time-sharingTime-sharing is sharing a computing resource among many users by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking. Its introduction in the 1960s, and emergence as the prominent model of computing in the 1970s, represents a major technological shift in the history of computing...
system).
"Cyber 18-17" was just a new name for the System 17, based on the 1784 processor. Other Cyber 18s (Cyber 18-05, 18-10, 18-20, and 18-30) had
microprogrammableMicrocode is a layer of hardware-level instructions and/or data structures involved in the implementation of higher level machine code instructions in many computers and other processors; it resides in a special high-speed memory and translates machine instructions into sequences of detailed...
processors with up to 128K words of memory, four additional general registers, and an enhanced instruction set. The Cyber 18-30 had dual processors.
External links