Meiko Scientific
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Meiko Scientific was a supercomputer company founded by members of the design team working on the INMOS Transputer. When management suggested the release of the Transputer be delayed, Miles Chesney resigned and started work on massively-parallel machines based on the CPU. Nine weeks later they demonstrated a Transputer system at the SIGGRAPH in San Francisco in July 1985, which was released in 1986 as the Meiko Computing Surface.
The original Computing Surface (later known as the CS-1) used numbers of Transputer T414's connected together using their internal communications links, running a Unix-like OS known as MeikOS. The T414's were replaced with T800's as soon as these became available. Users were expected to write applications for the CS on other machines they owned, and then upload the programs for running on the machine. This process was improved with the addition of a standard Sun Microsystems workstation to act as a "front end". Users could then program using tools running under SunOS, which would be uploaded and run automatically.
As the speed of the Transputer fell in relation to the other RISC chips on the market (the competitive T9000 took too long to ship) Meiko added the ability to replace the T800's with Intel i860s. Systems were typically sold with one or two i860's on a card along with two T800's acting as a communications system (referred to as a Network Interface Processor). The cards also included 64kB of cache and up to 32MB of RAM. Sold as the Concerto or CS i860, the system was not very popular.
The final machine in the Meiko lineup was the CS-2, which replaced the i860's with SPARC CPU's. The expansion cards were similar to those in the earlier machines, mounting RAM, cache, and a SuperSPARC CPU, and could add an additional vector processing chip from Fujitsu. Unlike the earlier systems the CS-2 no longer used the T800 as a link, and instead replaced them with custom hardware that was much faster.
A major drawback of the Meiko architecture was poor I/O bandwidth for general data shuffling. Although aggregate bandwidth for special case data shuffling could be very high, the general case has very poor performance relative to the compute bandwidth. This made the Meiko computing surface uneconomic for many applications.
The Meiko technical team was transferred to a joint venture company called Quadrics formed with Alenia Spazio in mid 1996. As of late 2004, Meiko's website is up, though limited to customers.
External links
- Meiko website (http://www.meiko.com/)
- Meiko (Survey of High Performance Computing Systems) (http://www.npac.syr.edu/nse/hpccsurvey/orgs/meiko/meiko.html)
- Meiko corporate overview (via Internet Archive) (http://web.archive.org/web/20001005071237/www.meiko.com/info/CorporateOverview.html)