Low-cost supercomputing workstations launched
STEPHEN C. STINSON · Chemical & Engineering News · 1987
A series of supercomputing workstations for use in networks or as stand-alone desk computers has been introduced by Sun Microsystems of Mountain View, Calif., at what the company says is a fraction of the prices of superminicomputers and up to 10 times their power. The Motorola 68030 microprocessor runs at 10 million instructions per second (MIPS) and the system does 1.6 million floating point operations per second (megaflops). Among uses targeted for this magnitude of computing and graphics power are chemical plant design and computational chemistry. The company prices a basic system with a monochrome monitor, 8 megabytes of memory, but no disk drive at $40,000. By convention, a byte is an 8-bit word, although the Sun products are 32-bit machines. This basic system is aimed at manufacturers of instruments and process equipment who want to put a computer on board. At the high end, a unit with 128 megabytes of main memory, 2.3- gigabyte ...