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Floating Point Systems Inc. (FPS) was a Beaverton, Oregon
Beaverton, Oregon

Beaverton is a city in Washington County, Oregon, Oregon, United States, seven miles west of Portland, Oregon in the Tualatin River Valley., its population is estimated to be 86,205, almost 14% more than the United States Census, 2000 figure of 76,129....
 vendor of minisupercomputer
Minisupercomputer

Minisupercomputers constituted a class of computers that emerged in the mid-1980s. As scientific computing using vector processors became more popular, the need for lower-cost systems that might be used at the departmental level instead of the corporate level created an opportunity for new computer vendors to enter the market....
s. The company was founded in 1970 by former Tektronix
Tektronix

Tektronix, Inc. is a United States company best known for its test and measurement equipment such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment....
 engineer Norm Winningstad.

The original goal of the company was to supply floating point
Floating point

In computing, floating point describes a system for numerical representation in which a String of digits represents a rational number.The term floating point refers to the fact that the radix point can "float": that is, it can be placed anywhere relative to the Significant figures of the number....
 coprocessor
Coprocessor

A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor . Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, Savitsky-Golay derivation, or encryption....
s for minicomputers. In 1976, the AP-120B
FPS AP-120B

The FPS AP-120B was a pipeline-oriented vector processor manufactured by Floating Point Systems. It was designed to be attached to a host computer such as a DEC PDP-11 as a fast number-cruncher....
 array processor
Vector processor

A vector processor, or array processor, is a Central processing unit design where the instruction set includes operations that can perform mathematical operations on multiple data elements simultaneously....
 was produced. In 1981, the follow-on FPS-164 was produced, followed by its big brother, the 264 having the same architecture. This was 5 times faster using ECL
Emitter coupled logic

In electronics, emitter-coupled logic, or ECL, is a logic family in which current is steered through Bipolar junction transistors to implement logic functions....
 instead of TTL
Transistor-transistor logic

File:68k ttl.jpgTransistor?transistor logic is a class of digital circuits built from bipolar junction transistors and resistors. It is called transistor?transistor logic because both the logic gating function and the amplifying function are performed by transistors ....
 chips.

These processors were widely used for scientific applications in reflection seismology
Reflection seismology

Reflection seismology is a method of exploration geophysics that uses the principles of seismology to estimate the properties of the Earth's subsurface from reflection seismic waves....
, physical chemistry
Physical chemistry

Physical chemistry is the application of physics to macroscopic, microscopic, atomic, subatomic, and particulate phenomena in chemical systems within the field of chemistry traditionally using the principles, practices and concepts of thermodynamics, quantum chemistry, statistical mechanics and kinetics....
, NSA cryptology and other disciplines requiring large numbers of computations.






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Floating Point Systems Inc. (FPS) was a Beaverton, Oregon
Beaverton, Oregon

Beaverton is a city in Washington County, Oregon, Oregon, United States, seven miles west of Portland, Oregon in the Tualatin River Valley., its population is estimated to be 86,205, almost 14% more than the United States Census, 2000 figure of 76,129....
 vendor of minisupercomputer
Minisupercomputer

Minisupercomputers constituted a class of computers that emerged in the mid-1980s. As scientific computing using vector processors became more popular, the need for lower-cost systems that might be used at the departmental level instead of the corporate level created an opportunity for new computer vendors to enter the market....
s. The company was founded in 1970 by former Tektronix
Tektronix

Tektronix, Inc. is a United States company best known for its test and measurement equipment such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment....
 engineer Norm Winningstad.

The original goal of the company was to supply floating point
Floating point

In computing, floating point describes a system for numerical representation in which a String of digits represents a rational number.The term floating point refers to the fact that the radix point can "float": that is, it can be placed anywhere relative to the Significant figures of the number....
 coprocessor
Coprocessor

A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor . Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, Savitsky-Golay derivation, or encryption....
s for minicomputers. In 1976, the AP-120B
FPS AP-120B

The FPS AP-120B was a pipeline-oriented vector processor manufactured by Floating Point Systems. It was designed to be attached to a host computer such as a DEC PDP-11 as a fast number-cruncher....
 array processor
Vector processor

A vector processor, or array processor, is a Central processing unit design where the instruction set includes operations that can perform mathematical operations on multiple data elements simultaneously....
 was produced. In 1981, the follow-on FPS-164 was produced, followed by its big brother, the 264 having the same architecture. This was 5 times faster using ECL
Emitter coupled logic

In electronics, emitter-coupled logic, or ECL, is a logic family in which current is steered through Bipolar junction transistors to implement logic functions....
 instead of TTL
Transistor-transistor logic

File:68k ttl.jpgTransistor?transistor logic is a class of digital circuits built from bipolar junction transistors and resistors. It is called transistor?transistor logic because both the logic gating function and the amplifying function are performed by transistors ....
 chips.

These processors were widely used for scientific applications in reflection seismology
Reflection seismology

Reflection seismology is a method of exploration geophysics that uses the principles of seismology to estimate the properties of the Earth's subsurface from reflection seismic waves....
, physical chemistry
Physical chemistry

Physical chemistry is the application of physics to macroscopic, microscopic, atomic, subatomic, and particulate phenomena in chemical systems within the field of chemistry traditionally using the principles, practices and concepts of thermodynamics, quantum chemistry, statistical mechanics and kinetics....
, NSA cryptology and other disciplines requiring large numbers of computations. Attached array processors were usually used in facilities where larger supercomputers were either not needed or not affordable. In 1986, the T-Series hypercube
Hypercube

In geometry, a hypercube is an n-dimensional analogue of a Square and a cube . It is a Closed set, Compact space, Convex set figure whose 1-skeleton consists of groups of opposite parallel line segments aligned in each of the space's dimensions, at right angles to each other and of the same length....
 using INMOS
INMOS

INMOS Ltd. was a United Kingdom semiconductor device company, founded by Iann Barron, based in Bristol and incorporated in November 1978....
 transputers and Weitek
Weitek

Weitek Corporation was a former chip-design company that originally concentrated on floating point units for a number of commercial Central processing unit designs....
 floating-point processors was introduced.

In 1988, FPS acquired the assets of Celerity Computing of San Diego, California
San Diego, California

San Diego is the second largest city in California and the List of United States cities by population, located along the Pacific Ocean on the West Coast of the United States of the Western United States....
, renaming itself as FPS Computing.

Celerity's product lines were further developed by FPS, the Celerity 6000 minisupercomputer
Minisupercomputer

Minisupercomputers constituted a class of computers that emerged in the mid-1980s. As scientific computing using vector processors became more popular, the need for lower-cost systems that might be used at the departmental level instead of the corporate level created an opportunity for new computer vendors to enter the market....
 being developed into the FPS Model 500 series. They later became the S-MP
Cray S-MP

The Cray S-MP was a multiprocessor server computer sold by Cray Research from 1992 to 1993. It was based around the Sun Microsystems SPARC microprocessor architecture and could be configured with up to eight 66 MHz Bipolar Integrated Technology B5000 processors....
 and APP product lines of Cray Research when FPS was acquired by that larger company in 1991. The S-MP was a SPARC
SPARC

SPARC is a Reduced Instruction Set Computer microprocessor instruction set Computer architecture originally designed in 1985 by Sun Microsystems....
-based multiprocessor server (based on the Model 500); the APP an i860-based matrix co-processor array. After CRI purchased FPS, it changed the group's direction by making them Cray Research Superservers, Inc., later becoming the Cray Business Systems Division; however the S-MP architecture was not developed further, instead it was replaced by the Cray Superserver 6400, (CS6400) which was derived indirectly from a collaboration between Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. is a multinational corporation vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services, founded on February 24, 1982....
 and Xerox PARC
Xerox PARC

PARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology....
.

After Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics

Silicon Graphics, Inc. is a company manufacturer high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and computer software. SGI was founded by James H....
 acquired Cray Research in 1996, this business unit along with the CS6400 product line were sold to Sun Microsystems. This was a great strategic mistake by SGI, as Cray were developing the Starfire system at the time, this being launched by Sun as the very successful Ultra Enterprise 10000 multiprocessor servers. These systems allowed Sun to become a first tier vendor in the large server market which Silicon Graphics never achieved.

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