ETA Systems

ETA Systems was a supercomputer company spun off from Control Data Corporation (CDC) in the early 1980s in order to regain a footing in the supercomputer business. They successfully delivered an excellent machine, the ETA-10, but lost money continually while doing so. CDC management eventually gave up and folded the company.

Historical development

Seymour Cray left CDC in the early 1970s when they refused to continue funding of his CDC 8600 project. Instead they continued with the CDC STAR-100 while Cray went off to build the Cray-1. Cray's machine was much faster than the STAR, and soon CDC found itself pushed out of the supercomputing market.

William Norris was convinced the only way to regain a foothold would be to spin off a division that would be free from management prodding. In order to regain some of the small-team flexibility that seemed essential to progress in the field, ETA was created in 1983 with the mandate to build a 10GFLOPS machine by 1986.

Products

ETA had only one product, the ETA-10. It was essentially a modernized version of the CDC Cyber-205 computer, and deliberately kept compatibility with it. Like the Cyber series, the ETA-10 did not use vector registers as in the Cray machines, but instead used pipelined memory operations to a high-bandwidth main memory. The basic layout was a shared-memory multiprocessor with up to 8 CPUs (and up to 16 I/O processors), each capable of 4 double-precision or 8 single-precision operations per clock cycle.