ETA10-E at FSU

Photo by J. Vagi

• 4 Processors
• 32 Megabytes (4 Megawords) Local Memory per Processor
• 1500 MegaFLOPS Peak Speed
• Cooled by liquid nitrogen
• The first ETA10 in operation
• Installed January 1987, Decommissioned April 1989

In 1987, the world’s first ETA Systems Class VII supercomputer was delivered to FSU as the first of four ETA 10 machines. It came without an operating system, since this was about a year before a reliable operating system was available and the computer could be used on a network. In March 1987, a major milestone was achieved at FSU, when a single user was able to log in to the ETA-10, interactively and successfully load, compile and execute a number of Fortran jobs. Some CFD benchmarks rated the 10.5 nsec machine at 11 times the performance of a single-processor CRAY X-MP when 32-bit working was used on the ETA-10.

by pschow from Sun Bloggers

ETA was forced to ship system #1 without a full OS. Jobs could still be run on this system but they had to be started in "monitor mode" with no scheduler running. To get Fortran programs running on the ETA at FSU in January 1987, we compiled them on the adjacent CYBER 205, and moved the binaries to the ETA Service Unit with none other than the trusty Kermit communications program, which always seemed to "just work", no matter what system it was running on.