Intel offers faster line of supercomputers
JAMES H. KRIEGER · Chemical & Engineering News · 1987
Intel Scientific Computers' hypercube-based family of concurrent supercomputers entered its second generation last week. The company announced new hardware and software developments that make the iPSC/2 family much simpler to program and up to 10 times faster than the first generation. The high-speed parallel computer systems are used primarily for large-scale scientific and engineering applications. Some of the possible applications are of direct chemical interest. Since introducing the first iPSC generation two years ago (C&EN, Feb. 18, 1985, page 31), Intel has shipped about 70 of the systems worldwide. About 70% are used in research at universities, 20% in defense-related applications at government and defense contractorsites, and 10% in production use. During that period, Intel says it determined that there definitely is a market for cost-effective supercomputing featuring high performance for real-world applications. The iPSC family architecture is based on the hypercube topology developed at California Institute of Technology in research sponsored by the ...