cdc cyber
96: cdc demonstrates the cyber 203, a predecessor of its cyber 205 product. (lnr: cdc cyber 203 )
38: cdc produces the cdc 7600 pipelined supercomputer as a follow - on to the cdc 6600. (wgv: cray, seymour; cdc 7600 )
/ pdf / cdc / cyber / cyber _ 170 / 60456100k _ cyber _ 170 _ models _ 720 - 760 _ 176b _ harware _ reference _ jul81. pdf
index of / sites / www. bitsavers. org / pdf / cdc / cyber
6: control data corporation (cdc) founded. (lnr: cdc )
25: cdc introduces cdc 6500, containing two cdc 6400 processors. principal architect is jim thornton. (lnr, bwe: cdc 6500; thornton, jim )
from the urltoken collection, a scanned - in computer - related document. cdc: : cyber: : cyber 170: : 60456100k cyber 170 models 720 - 760 176b harware reference jul81
index of / sites / www. bitsavers. org / pdf / cdc / cyber /
cdc cyber, a family of mainframe supercomputers by control data corporation during the 1970s and 1980s, included five very different models, 60 - bit cyber 70 / 170, 64 - bit cyber 180 and 200, cyberplus and cyber - 18 .
127: control data delivers the cyber 205 vector supercomputer, which has a memory - to - memory architecture. (wm: cdc cyber 205 )
from the urltoken collection, a scanned - in computer - related document. cdc: : cyber: : cyber 170: : 60420300aa cyber 170 models 175 740 - 760 865 875 functional units theory aug83
/ pdf / cdc / cyber / cyber _ 170 / 60420300aa _ cyber _ 170 _ models _ 175 _ 740 - 760 _ 865 _ 875 _ functional _ units _ theory _ aug83. pdf
manuscript title: vectorizing the monte carlo algorithm for lattice gauge theory calculations on the cdc cyber 205 .
11: control data starts development of cdc 6600. (wm: cray, seymour; cdc 6600 )
134, 400 (octal) words of cm were required for running the test case on an cdc cyber 740 .
nea - db executed the test case included in this package on a cdc cyber 740 computer in 161 seconds of cpu time .
34: group formed at control data to study the computing needs of image processing; this leads to the cdc afp and cyberplus designs. (wm: cdc cyberplus; cdc afp )
45: cdc delivers hardwired cyberplus parallel radar image processing system to rome air development center, where it achieves 250 times the performance of a cdc 6600. (wm: cdc cyberplus )
registration is required to use the cyber cancer registry. all information collected for registration will be kept confidential and used solely for cyber cancer registry administration .
control data cyber 170 series, cyber series, models 71 / 72 / 73 / 74, 6000 series computer systems: cobol version 4 reference manual; cdc operating systems, nos 1, nos / be 1 .
control data cyber 170 series, cyber series, models 71 / ​72 / ​73 / ​74, 6000 series computer systems: cobol version 4 reference manual; cdc operating systems, nos 1, nos / ​be 1 .
for what it is worth, the cyber 810 performance (the base of the left column above) equals 0. 91 mips, the cyber 932 - 11 rated 2 & mips and the cyber 990 (scalar) 25 mips .
da4000 _ cyber _ hardware _ for _ analysts _ section _ 1. pdf
da4000 _ cyber _ hardware _ for _ analysts _ section _ 2. pdf
155: eta systems, inc. spun off from cdc to develop a new generation of vector supercomputers. (wgv: cdc; eta )
71: cyber 200 project begins at control data; its architecture is to be memoryto - memory, like that of the star - 100. its principal architect is neil lincoln. (wm: cdc cyber 200; lincoln, neil )
control data cyber 170 series, cyber series, models 71 / 72 / 73 / 74, 6000 series computer systems: cobol version 4 reference manual; cdc operating systems, nos 1, nos / be 1. - version details - trove
in march, 1985, the computing center took delivery of its first supercomputer, a cdc cyber 205, along with a front - end file server cdc cyber 835. the cyber 205 system included: cpu with 20 - nanosecond clock cycle, 2 vector pipelines, 32 megabytes of central memory and 7. 2 gigabytes of on - line disk storage. the cyber 205 had a theoretical peak performance of 200 mflops, and a linpack rating of 17 mflops. the cyber 835 system added another 20 gigabytes of on - line disk. in addition, four 6250 bpi on - line tape drives were shared between the cyber 205 and the cyber 835. communications between the cyber 205, its peripherals, and various front - end mainframes were handled by a loosely - coupled network (lcn) consisting of four separate coaxial trunks. in its final configuration, the lcn connected the cyber 205 to two cdc cybers, two dec vax computers, the eta - 10 and an ibm mainframe .
installation of the cyber 74; three of four' bays' are already connected .
the installation of the cyber 74 in august 1978 took three weeks. at first the
most prominent chess program running on cdc cyber 70 / 170 was northwestern university' s chess 4. x, supported by cdc cyber hardware consultant david cahlander. already at the wccc 1974, with chess still running on a cdc 6600, nils barricelli' s freedom ran on a cyber 74. at acm 1975, with iron fish on a cyber 74, chess 4. 4 already ran on a cyber 175 [ 3 ], chess 4. 5 at acm 1976, chess 4. 6 at acm 1977, chess 4. 7 at acm 1978, also playing the levy match, and chess 4. 9 at acm 1979 all ran on a 60 - bit cyber 176 [ 4 ]. martin bryant' s first chess program, white knight, written in pascal, was compiled to ran on a cyber 72 [ 5 ]. nuchess played the wccc 1980 on cyber 176, so did the austrian merlin at the international computer chess tournament 1984. chat played the wccc 1986 on a cyber 175 .
14: cdc delivers first cdc 1604. machine is similar to ibm 7090, featuring 48 bit words and a 6? sec memory cycle time. (men, lnr: cdc 1604; cray, seymour; thornton, jim )
85: cdc delivers the flexible processor, a programmable signal processing unit with a 48 - bit instruction word. (wm, nd: cdc flexible processor )
). by april, the cdc cyber 205 supercomputer became available to scri associates, other doe researchers around the u. s. and the state university system of florida .
the console was an ordinary cdc 741 serial terminal, unlike on cdc 6000 - style machines. in may 2007, ken hunter fleshed out the story this way :
( the above tables were taken from page 26 of the cdc publication listed below. )
centers for disease control and prevention - cdc 24 / 7: saving lives, protecting people .
272: control data shuts down eta systems in april. (wm: cdc; eta )
146: control data improves its flexible processor to create the advanced flexible processor (afp), with a 210 - bit instruction word. (wm, nd: cdc flexible processor; cdc afp )
was so overloaded that expansion of the cpu capacity, of the disks and the memory had to take place. the replacement of the cdc 6400 by a cdc cyber 74 was scheduled. the largest applications were simulations for tanks and the
wargame
- application continuously increased as new models of military equipment were developed .
a small curiosity is that the cdc line printers were 136 columns. the rest of the industry had settled on 132 columns, no doubt a number chosen by ibm that everybody else except cdc chose to copy. i don' t know why cdc used 136 but it probably dates way back to their earliest systems .
the cdc cyber 200 series computer provides computational capability measured in the hundreds of mflops (millions of floating point operations per second). this capability is due to its vector processing hardware. the goal of this paper is twofold :
the cdc cyber 180 series has 48 - bit pointers consisting of a ring, segment, and offset. most users (in ring 11) have null pointers of 0xb00000000000. it was common on old cdc ones - complement machines to use an all - one - bits word as a special flag for all kinds of data, including invalid addresses .
which involves running nos on top of a cyber emulator (courtesy of tom hunter, below). a plato history blog is
like most 180 state programmers, most programmers only vaguely aware of 180 state architecture. assembly language was not a part of 180 state culture as it had been with the cdc 6000 series. therefore, nearly all of the information presented here is from a 60 - page cdc document entitled cyber 180 computer systems system architecture. the copy is dated 3 / 84 .
. cdc cyberplus computer system: preliminary hardware reference manual. control data corporation, dec. 1983, 344 pp .
the intention was to get both users and support personnel up - to - speed on the cyber 205, which was running the vsos operating system, in advance of the installation of eta - 10 serial # 1. in its final configuration, the eta - 10 would provide twelve times the processing power and a compatible vsos environment. the plan assumed that after a successful period of acceptance testing on the eta - 10, the cyber 205 and its file server (a cyber 835) would be returned to cdc .
a fellow named tom hunter developed a cyber emulator which he hoped to sell to the few remaining cyber sites as an alternative to keeping their old mainframes running. a more recent check showed it' s available at no cost under a gnu license. his web site is at
the cyber 730 was installed by september 1979. the 760 was installed in february / march of 1980, and the sigma 7 was finally retired from service on june 1. the sigma and 1401 were used as trade - ins on the cdc equipment; cdc disposed of the 1401 via the landfill, and the sigma was sold by cdc to a dealer specializing in used xerox equipment. the former computer center offices were quickly taken over by duplicating, and the machine room was taken over by the science library .
cdc confused matters by including some old iron in the supposedly new cyber 180 series. as i recall, the cyber 180 / 865 and a few others were basically yet another rehash of the cdc 7600. (see footnote .) our 810, bottom - of - the - line that it was, was nevertheless a full 180 - mode machine. the salesman boasted that even this low - end machine had more i / o bandwidth than the most expensive ibm mainframe available. back then, ibm i / o channels ran at very modest speeds .
in the past, uw had hired in - house maintenance engineers to save the cost of vendor - contracted maintenance. with the cybers, this policy was reversed and cdc supplied laramie - resident engineers, with a uw - donated office in the ivinson building. for some time there were three on - site engineers though it should be noted that cdc had a few other small maintenance contracts in the region, and the laramie crew sometimes covered for the engineers in fort collins where csu also had cybers (even a cyber 205 supercomputer for a few years). cdc cut this back to two engineers, and eventually just one when it became clear uw would not continue to be a cdc customer .
a top cyber - security specialist in russia' s federal security service (fsb) has been arrested on charges of treason, the kommersant newspaper reported wednesday .
many people consider the cray - 1 to be the first true
supercomputer .
however, cdc (for whom seymour cray worked at the time) freely used that term in their advertising of the cdc 6000 series, for example in an ad in september 1967' s cacm .
mikhailov has been detained in pre - trial detention since december 2016, alongside ruslan stoyanov, the head of cyber - crime investigations at russia' s kaspersky labs .
login is required to download resources. cdc does not use your login information for any other purpose. please review our privacy policy for more information .
control data came out with four lines of computers compatible with the original 6600: the 6000 series, the cyber 70 series, the cyber 170 series, and the cyber 180 series series. (the 7600 and its successors are included in with these four lines, even though the 7600 had slightly different i / o .) there wasn' t a whole lot of difference amoungst the 6000 (discrete technology; core memory), 70, and 170 lines with exception of type of packaging, memory and cooling technology. on the other hand, for the most part, the cyber 180 series really was a new line. most of the cyber 180' s were dramatically different cisc machines that had a 6000 compatibility mode. (there were a few models in the 180 series that were just of the same old architecture with a new name again. )
after we abandoned cdc, as the years went by, cdc was clearly in financial difficulty. they would occasionally sell off their successful and profitable divisions (cdc credit corporation and the magnetic peripherals division are examples) in order to shore up the
core business
which was mainframes, in an era when mainframes were thought to be on the way out. eventually cdc folded, and the last vestiges of the computer business became control data systems which basically is a value - added reseller of other' s workstations. it' s also sad to see digital equipment corporation doing some of the same tricks (e. g. selling off their disk drive division in colorado springs to quantum, 1994) and one wonders if dec will recover, after watching cdc .
editor (1978). cyber 176 tops toronto chess tournament. personal computing, vol. 2, no. 7, pp. 79 » chess 4. 6, wccc 1977
this document is one of a series of 12 documents giving overviews of various aspects of cdc' s new line of computers. each had a cover featuring a large (over half of life - size) photograph of a person. it' s amusing to note that none of the 12 supposed cyber users depicted was a young white male .
by now, it was becoming clear that cdc was a losing proposition. they were failing to maintain their user base, and had long been lagging behind the rest of the industry in many respects. the cyber 180 series was a good attempt at playing catch - up but this was blunted by the non - acceptance of nos / ve .
62: cdc delivers the star - 100, the first commercial pipelined vector supercomputer, to the lawrence livermore national laboratory. the machine uses a memory - to - memory architecture; its principal architects are jim thornton and neil lincoln. (lnr: cdc star - 100; llnl; thornton, jim; lincoln, neil )
the flexible processor family from cdc was a set of designs based on an array of processors, each of which used a horizontally - microcoded (vliw) instruction set .
cdc manual 76294500. the flexible processor: a special - purpose computer. control data corporation, digital image systems division, minneapolis, aug. 1977, 52 pp .
cdc manual. control data advanced flexible processor operating system description. control data corporation, information sciences division, minneapolis, aug. 1979 (revision), 29 pp .
from this lecture i own a copy of
control data cyber 70 series - 6000 series - 7600 computer series
pocket manual
compass version 3
printed in 1973. this document clearly states that in the cyber 70 models 74 and 6600 computers, the opcode
47
for
population count
was executed by the divide unit. contrary, the cyber 70 models 76 and 7600 computers had a separate population count unit. if i understood the opcode table correctly the respective opcode was executed in one or two clock cycles (very fast; the same as shift opcodes) .
cdc shows fast signal processor ,
eetimes, march 31, 1986, p. 4. [ micro - afp, in pmsp (parallel modular signal processor) ]
18: control data corporation produces the cdc 6600, the first supercomputer to be both a technical and commercial success. each machine contained one 60 - bit cpu and 10 peripheral processing units (ppus); the cpu used a scoreboard to manage instruction dependencies. (wgv, md, bl: cdc 6600; cray, seymour; thornton, jim )
at the end of 1985 the cyber' s 7 - track tape drive was removed from service, and most of the keypunches had also been removed. the cyber card punch was supposed to be dropped in late 1986 but the inability of several campus offices to switch to new applications on other platforms repeatedly delayed this. the punch was eventually dropped from the maintenance contract but remained connected until the cybers were removed .
sergei mikhailov, deputy chief at the fsb' s information security center (cdc), stands accused of receiving money from “foreign organizations, ” kommersant reported, citing unnamed fsb sources .
because there was no direct interface available to connect the versatec plotter to a cyber, a tape drive and controller were purchased and the plotter was run as an offline device via 9 - track 1600 bpi tapes .
cdc manual 77900504b. advanced flexible processor: system software description. control data corporation, feb. 1980 (revision), 103 pp. [ see appendix a for
afp description
]
the 810 was the bottom - of - the - line of cdc' s new line of mainframes. this new cyber 180 series featured machines with a dual instruction set. in cyber 170 mode, the machines were almost 100% compatible with the cdc 6000 series and its successors. in 180 mode, the architecture and instruction set were quite a bit different. 180 mode had a full 64 - bit architecture - - fooey on kids these days who think that the mips r4000 or some other johnny - come - lately was the first 64 - bit machine! (of course, the cray 1 beat even the 180 to the party .) 180 mode featured virtual memory and a whopping 48 - bit address space. cdc claimed that if you bought enough disk space from them to fill the address space of the machine, they' d throw in a top - of - the - line 180 / 990. needless to say, they never made this claim for the (18 - bit) 170 series !
48: seymour cray leaves control data corporation to found cray research inc. cdc cancels the 8600 project, a follow - on to the 7600. (wgv: cri; cray, seymour )
the cyber 180 series systems were full 64 - bit machines. memory was 64 - bit word and 8 - bit byte addressable. integers were 64 bits long, though 32 - bit integers were used for addresses in instructions .
, which has been the standard reference on the cdc ever since. long out of print, mr. thornton gave tom uban permission to scan the book and make it available on the net .
as part of the sigma - to - cyber transition, i wrote several utilities to read sigma labeled tapes, which were not at all ansi standard labeled format. this had to include conversion of character data from ebcdic to display code as well as binary data to cyber 170 formats. this is one of the areas where lots of bit - twiddling had to be done. in the sigma era it was common for system programmers to know a lot about internal data structures, and xerox had documented them fairly well. so had cdc, but those days seem to be gone now; digital won' t even document the format of their mail. mai file .
some time around mid - 1984 the cyber 730 was replaced with a cyber 835. the 835 was a member of the new 180 - series architecture, which featured 64 - bit words, hexadecimal, ascii, and virtual addressing; it was a contemporary machine. the 180 architecture also allowed running in 170 - architecture mode. not by emulation, which would be slow, but by actually * being * a 170 - series implementation as well as a 180. in other words it was
bilingual
. this allowed a site to acquire a system and to run their old software in 170 mode, and run / develop / test new applications in 180 mode under the new operating system called nos / ve (nos, virtual environment). unfortunately the 835 was serial number 1 and suffered intermittent failures that cdc could never fix. they eventually offered a reasonable upgrade path to a newer cyber 840, which replaced the 835 .
by april, 1985, the cyber 205 was running production code from local researchers and doe researchers around the country. the operating system software was soon upgraded to vsos 2. 2, providing more features and increased stability. languages supported were: fortran (with vectorizing pre - processor), c with vector extensions, and the cyber 205 assembly language. numerous mathematical packages such as cern, imsl and magev were installed, as well as the di - 3000 and ncar graphics packages .
like the data general nova eclipse in tracey kidder' s the soul of a new machine, cdc cyber 180 machines could run in one of two modes or states: 170 state, which was basically the same as the old cdc 6000 line, and the new 180 state, which is what nos / ve used. there was quite a bit of difference between the two. the 170 state was more riscy than almost any current so - called risc processor, such as alpha, mips, or powerpc. the 180 state was full - blown cisc, with virtual memory. some basic ideas of the ge (later honeywell) multics operating system and its underlying hardware requirements (security rings, virtual space) were stretched even further in the design of the 180 - series and the nos / ve system on top of it. in the mid eighties there were discussions about the port of multics to the cyber 180 platform .
claimed performance of 64 cyberplus systems linked to a single control data 170 series 800 is 16 billion calculations per second on signal data applications. change detection algorithm for image processing is about 100 times faster than on a cdc 7600 .
from the day it came up for production until the day it was shut down, the cyber 205 cpu was in use 96% of the time it was available. after the implementation of the standby job category in november, 1985, it was in use over 98% of the time available. though not cutting - edge technology (ours was the next to last one built), the cyber 205 was a consistent performer, and provided a reasonably stable supercomputing environment for researchers at fsu and around the country .
solution method: a monte carlo simulation of the system set up on a lattice (with varying numbers of sites per dimension considered) under an su (4) gauge field generates a series of field configurations. the method of metropolis et al. is used to achieve statistical equilibrium. once in a state of statistical equilibrium any order parameter for the system can be measured. the vector capability of the cdc cyber 205 is exploited to significantly reduce the time over that used on a scalar machine .
the new director started a lengthy and complex project to define computing requirements, issue and evaluate an rfp, and select a
winner
. one of the requirements was two separate systems for redundancy, with identical instruction sets for compatibility. one system was to be
slow and small ,
relatively speaking, and the other
fast and big
. this would allow large - scale computing, without spending the money for two expensive systems. several million dollars (6 ?) was made available by the state legislature. eventually, around mid - 1978, the decision was made to purchase a cyber 730 and a cyber 760 from control data corporation (actually the bid was for a model 173 and 175 respectively, but cdc changed the model numbers between bid and delivery) .
restrictions: the storage required is dependent on the number n of dimensionsand the number l of lattice sites along each dimension. the arrays in the program that usually have the largest dimensions are dimensioned to nl * * n (i. e. the number of links involved in the lattice). the execution time increases with the number of links and the number of monte carlo iterations. the code will only execute on cdc cyber 200 computers due a to usage of extensions of fortran which amount to syntax for vector operations .
back then, our idea of an
application
was a compiler or os utility; there weren' t too many commercially available traditional applications for cdc systems. however, there were spss (a statistical package) and imsl (fortran math subroutine library) .
the russian media reported on jan. 13 that cdc chief andrei gerasimov could be forced to leave his post due to an investigation being carried out against one of his deputies. unnamed sources told kommersant that a private computer security company was also involved in the case .
the cyber registry is an interactive tool developed with the national program of cancer registries (npcr) to prepare people for a career in the cancer registry field. by working through the exercises and quizzes, you will gain practical experience in the functions of a cancer registrar in both hospitals and central registries .
please complete the information below and click submit. you will use your e - mail address to log in. a temporary password will be e - mailed to you on completing the information below. when you access the cyber cancer registry for the first time, you will need to change this password .
the cyber 205 remained in service until october 24, 1989. during its 4 1 / 2 years at fsu, the cyber 205 was available for use over 38, 000 hours (95% of wall - clock time, and 97. 6% of scheduled uptime). the addition of an uninterruptible power source (ups) in december, 1986, significantly decreased downtime due to power outages, from 148 hours in fiscal 1986 to only 10 hours in fiscal 1987. the mean - time - between - failure rate went from one failure every 35 hours before the ups was installed to one every 127 hours afterward .
kascic m. j. (1980) vector processing on the cyber 200 and vector numerical linear algebra. in: hirschel e. h. (eds) proceedings of the third gamm — conference on numerical methods in fluid mechanics. notes on numerical fluid mechanics, vol 2. vieweg + teubner verlag, wiesbaden
work had begun in st. paul on the 'w series' of the developmental eos operating system and, by the end of the year, prototypes were being evaluated at fsu. in the meantime, supercomputer support personnel from fsucc and scri were still concentrating on the production cyber 205 service. the user base had built up while expertise had been gained and passed on. fsucc consolidated operations in december with the relocation to sliger building, innovation park, of the cyber 205 and support staff. it is worth noting that the new home for fsucc had essentially been built around the eta - 10 which was already in place .
lawrence livermore national laboratory (llnl); the atomic energy commission gives the contract to cdc instead, who build the star - 100 to fulfil it. slotnick' s design funded by the air force, and evolves into the illiac - iv. the machine is built at the university of illinois, with burroughs and texas instruments as primary subcontractors. texas instruments' advanced scientific computer (asc) also grows out of this initiative. (wm, md: slotnick, daniel; aec; illiac - iv; cdc star - 100; ti asc; llnl )
the change to cdc presented performance and reliability upgrades that were simply startling, especially to old - time sigma programmers. one thing that cdc definitely did right was build hardware. most of their equipment bordered on being masterpieces of both mechanical and electronic engineering. the tape drives were much faster, and the jump from 800 bpi to 6250 bpi was outstanding. after a few years, one of the cdc model 580 line printers was upgraded with a 96 - character train (late 1984). the card readers were fast. the cpus were fast. it was a real eye - opening experience, dulled only by the extreme workload of converting software or just raw concepts from the ancient systems to the cybers, and the annoyance of working within new constraints that weren' t there before. but the increase in computing was over an order of magnitude .
the 180 series had a real - memory address space of 31 bits. unlike the 170 (cdc 6000) series, 180 mode featured virtual memory. page sizes ranged from 2048 to 65536 bytes in increments of powers of two, with nos / ve supporting 2048 to 16386 - byte pages .
the cdc engineers all impressed me with their knowledge not only of the hardware, but even of the operating system software. cdc was definitely dedicated to helping the customer. frequently, parts needed to be shuttled up from denver or fort collins; the laramie and fort collins engineers would arrange a meet at virginia dale, about halfway, and hand over the part (s). this continued until one of them was accosted by the shotgun - wielding proprietor / resident who thought this was a homeless bum parked for the night; from then on, meets were done at the nearby rest area .
dedication: since this whole series follows my history with computers in the bay area, i want to dedicate the final cache to a true pioneer i had the honor of working with, betty holberton. she was one of the first 6 programmers of digital computers ever, all women. urltoken the cdc cyber 180 series represented control data' s final break with the 60 - bit words and 6 - bit characters that were used by all models starting with the cdc 6600. the new hardware used 64 - bit words and 8 - bit characters. however, the hardware models were ready well before the nos / ve operating system, new compilers, etc. in order to achieve a graceful transition, the machines had an alternate microcode that could run all of the old 60 - bit code. therefore, they were originally sold as the cyber 170 / 800 series and appeared to be just another hardware technology rev of the existing line. when the new 64 - bit mode operating system and software was ready, all that had to be done was announce it and let existing customers know they already had hardware that could run the new mode at the same time as the old mode. this provided a way for customers to move to the new architecture while still running their old software .
installation of the first prototype eta - 10 processor began at the fsu computing center on january 5, 1987. the clock cycle time for this cpu was 12. 5 nanoseconds and within two weeks it was running a fortran job transferred from the cyber 205, in monitor mode. this process required the compilation of source code and subsequent loading of object code on the cyber 205 to create a controllee, or executable file, which was then transferred to the eta via an apollo workstation. the binary would then be loaded into memory on the eta - 10 and run directly on hardware, not under the control of an operating system. limited output could be obtained from the equivalent of core dumps .
grishman _ cdc6000asmlangpgmg. pdf
assembly language programming for the control data 6000 and cyber series
by ralph grishman my favorite quote :
this book is dedicated to a6 & a7, without which none of the results in this book could have been saved .
this text is intended to familiarize users with the design of the control data 6000 series, cyber 70 series, and cyber 170 series computer systems and to enable them to write central processor assembly language code. [... ] this text will try to be explanatory and not simply expository. that is, we won' t simply tell you that the structure of the computer is so and so, and the instructions are (1)... , (2)... , etc. , and
that' s how things are .
undeniably, it is important to know the instruction set backwards and forwards to write really good code, but there is something else you should understand: why the machine was built the way it was. clearly it is impossible to show that the 6600 is the best machine configuration (it isn' t, as ibm, univac, and cdc' s other competitors will hasten to point out), but you should at least see why it is a reasonably good design, and why some of the choices were made as they were .
the host cdc 170 series 800 (under nos 2) loads code into the processors, transmits data from host to processors, and starts and stops processor' s task. software includes a cross assembler (mica), a cyberplus instructor load simulator (echos), and an ansi 77 fortran cross - compiler .
series were engineered and announced within less than a year of each other. yet after a 10 - year run with the sigma, we purchased a system that was a direct descendant of the 6600, namely the cyber 760. though we gained a lot in several areas like speed and reliability, in some aspects we didn' t (octal, 1960s architecture) .
at some point in nos' lifetime, cdc hired a consultant to see what they could do to make it more user - friendly. one of the most visible changes centered around the variety of
illegal
messages such as
illegal control statement
; the word
illegal
was changed everywhere to
incorrect .
compute - wise, the 810 ran very slowly, about at the speed of a 286. the comparison to a 286 was a natural one at the time, since ibm had recently released the ibm pc / at. hence, the 810 belied cdc' s reputation as a maker of machines with more cpu than i / o horsepower .
one day the cyber 760 started acting strangely. subsystems hanging or aborting, programs behaving strangely. nos was moderately unique in that it allowed running most hardware diagnostics under nos, not just standalone. after firing up some of these programs, it was discovered that there was a hardware fault in one of the floating - point instructions, at which point we immediately took the system down for repair. after that, we fired up these diagnostics for a few seconds every hour or so, using a scheduling package from cdc' s engineering group. that package was annoying because if you set the system time back even 1 second, it would conclude that almost 24 hours had elapsed and fired off a day' s worth of jobs !
when the 835 arrived, the 730 was first removed and stored. later it was hauled up our cumbersome loading ramp by a tow truck' s winch. one set of 730 wheels fell into an expansion joint and needed quite a tug to proceed; but the tow truck operator had not set the parking brake, and the truck and 730 both rolled down the ramp. the truck, being at an angle, struck the retaining wall and stopped. at that instant, the 730 struck the brick wall at the base of the loading area and the sideways jerk from the tow cable caused it to fall over onto the concrete. one of the cdc engineers almost got squashed in the mishap. the 730 was declared a total loss; at that point it was cdc' s property, so arguments over whose fault it was went on between cdc, the tow truck, and the moving company that had hired the tow truck. only then did i realize the serial number of this system was 911. somebody, i believe it was dave haas, took some pictures. i scanned the proof sheet at 200 dpi (
in a desperate / bold (take your pick) move to upgrade service at no cost, we entered a limited partnership with cdc to help them develop cdcnet, their initial ethernet venture. we donated two programmers who went to work for cdc in minneapolis for one year. in exchange, we received several pieces of hardware called device interfaces (dis). some interfaced the mainframes to an ethernet cable, and others were terminal servers. because there was no campus network yet, the terminal servers went straight into the existing gandalf pacx. the two employees wrote a couple of terminal interface programs (tips) and were also responsible for an additional year of maintenance on the tips after returning to laramie. during some of the cdcnet development, uw would upgrade nos every week or two; this is known in the trade as
hectic
and was a challenge to streamline the process of building new deadstart tapes from a raw release. in all, the effort fell flat because we didn' t spend much more time with cdc hardware, and didn' t have any real network yet. this was around 1984 - 1986 .
) to the u. s. department of energy (doe), a collaborative agreement was initiated in late 1984 between the state of florida, fsu, doe and control data corporation (cdc). this first brought about the creation of the fsu supercomputer computations research institute (scri) followed by the delivery in march 1985 of interim computer hardware to the fsu computing center (
the cybers were interesting systems in that they were even then
throwback
systems. they used 60 - bit words, octal arithmetic, one' s - complement arithmetic (which meant there as a negative zero as well as a positive zero, and they were sometimes not equal to each other), non - hierarchical file systems with seven - character file names, and used character coding unique to cdc (not bcd, not ascii, and not ebcdic, it was called
display code
). the fact that the cyber 170 architecture used a word length that was not a power of two caused a few problems when programming at the bit level, and dealing with the 8 - bit bytes that everybody else used (e. g. the ams systems and offline plotters) made for an interesting challenge .
it is also curious to note that a requirement of the rfp was two computers with identical instruction sets, yet the two cdc systems were not identical. the 730 had the optional
compare / move unit
that implemented instructions mostly used by cobol programs such as decimal arithmetic. this was not an option on the 760, which would emulate these instructions faster than the 730 could execute them in hardware .
card reader did not like the hole in the middle, as it set off the
end of card
photodetectors. our resident cdc engineer, ken aksamit, tried several quick logic changes to make the reader accept the cards (hey kids, try that on your pc !) but it wasn' t a simple task. in the end we gave up, but it was an interesting experiment .
to obtain lower - case characters, and other special characters, cdc invented
6 / 12 ascii
in which they coded some characters as 6 - bit entities, others as 12 bit; not all their software understood 6 / 12, and the two sets were marginally incompatible. the user address space was 128k words, and the memory was not paged or what most anybody would call virtual. the systems did not have any interrupts per se, but did have a central processor and up to 12 peripheral processors that themselves were 12 - bit i / o processors. the 760 was about a 10 - 12 mip system. though fast and quite an improvement, it seems that in 1978 cybers were already dead - end machines. cdc did endeavor to catch up with the industry, but more on that later .
communications equipment was changed during this time. most lines to the sigma' s front - end were leased lines with dedicated modems on each end. with the cybers, a gandalf pacx unit was installed in front of cdc' s front - ends (network processing units) which allowed users to easily select which computer to connect to (sigma, cybers, amss) and to select the desired baud rate as well .
in 1982 i bought a mazda rx - 7 and after a while noticed the odometer sitting at 3777 and thought
hey, it' s about to turn over to 4000 .
obviously i had cyber on the brain. brad thomas tells me of a friend who added up a bank deposit slip, but the teller came up with a different total; after they each came up with their own answer 3 times in a row, the friend suddenly realized he' d added it up in octal .
by the time cdc moved facilities from the orleans drive location to clyde avenue, the starting point of of this multi - cache, little software development for any of the hardware was going on. the company had morphed its remaining software talent into a consulting style operation and some web development work. the company had been bought by syntegra, a division of british telecom, and lived out it' s final days in the bay area at this location .
there was something to the n in nos and nos / ve, but we never really learned a lot about cdc networking. this 2551 had three terminal ports. we connected two of them via asynchronous lines to our x. 25 bus interface units, so we could access the 810 from anywhere on msu' s x. 25 network. the 2551 could also talk x. 25 directly, but we didn' t have enough memory to do this .
up to 16 rings can be connected to a cyber 800 computer (each connected through a channel ring port) with up to 16 cyberplus processors per ring. within this ring all processors can operate autonomously and may execute each clock cycle. processor memory interface allows direct reading and writing of the memory of any processor by another processor on the ring every machine cycle. central memory interface (cmi) for transfer of data to host. the central memory ring is 64 bits wide with an 80 nsec cycle time, and this provides a direct transfer of 64 bits between the cyber and a cyberplus processor. data transfers are controlled by the system ring and will be direct memory - to - memory transfers with the hpm memory on the cyberplus processors. two rings connect the processors: the system ring and the application ring. the ring packet has 13 bits of control information and 16 bits of data. a function code in the ring packet can determine whether access to other memories (one or several) is direct or indirect, the latter requiring the acceptance by the target processor .
a single processor, air cooled eta - 10q (19 ns clock) was deployed on december 12 intially to help those eta users with short term migration problems. the '` piper'', as the air cooled eta - 10 was known, ran the latest version of eos, namely 1. 1c, and allowed two or three local researchers the chance to complete calculations that would not otherwise have been possible on a busy cyber 205. the system proved to be a success for a user community of this size with production vsos jobs .
one day we tried to spin down one of the model 844 disk drives but it wouldn' t! the heads refused to retract, and the spindle motor would not shut down unless the heads were retracted. the engineers scratched their heads. if they simply shut down the power, it is * supposed * to retract the heads, but depending on what was wrong, it might not. throughout my career i' ve heard vendors claim
our disk drive will retract the heads if power is removed
yet i' ve seen examples where a failure was blamed on power loss. so, rather than risking a head crash, they looked over the logic diagrams and even called cdc in minneapolis to get a consensus on which of the many circuit breakers to trip first in order to ensure a head retraction (possibly manually), before powering off the drive for repair. it worked fine, and i was again impressed with cdc' s efforts to give the customer good service .
at the same time as the installation of the cyber 74, the lay - out of the computer room was changed. an air circulation separation was installed between the
dusty
print and card reading areas in the room and the (dust sensitive) magnetic tape handling area and the harddisk devices. this caused the number of disk errors to decrease spectacularly. hardware problems were daily monitored by means of a system log (cerfile) reporting tool (hpa). however, the first month with the new lay - out showed a very large number of read errors on the
in order to help programmers use 6 / 12 ascii or do other special functions during output, cdc decided to allow embedding certain
control codes
within text, as long as you did it at the beginning of a cm word. typically these codes began with a colon (character code 00). so, for example, if you had the misfortune to want to print or display a line of text that began with a colon, you usually ended up with output that you didn' t expect .
as we were planning the announcement of the migration of users to the eta - 10g, word was received on april 17 that control data corporation had closed eta systems and terminated its employees. this news came as a shock to fsu who had entered formal negotiations with cdc regarding a potential hardware upgrade to the eta equipment. in the meantime, it was to be '` business as usual'' at fsucc and users were duly given access to unix on pre 1. 1 on the eta - 10g on april 21 .
because the new tape controller also needed new' controlware', the so called
coldstart
controlware program had to be read by the punchcard reader operated by a special
deadstart program
( set by switches) into the tape controller. the problem was that the laboratory had no punchcard puncher and that the coldstart program was delivered on a magnetic tape. a chicken - or - egg problem. very creative work by an engineer with help of the system programmers, lead to a bootstrap process in which a coldstart deck was manifactured (
abc
- program) to wake up the new cyber .
cybers came with their own unique terminology, historically different from the rest of the industry. the central processor was the cp, not the cpu. the peripheral processors were pps, small 12 - bit processors grafted into the system to handle i / o (the cp did not have any i / o instructions). central memory was cm, 60 bits per word. most confusing, some terms were variable depending on context. sometimes a
byte
was 12 bits, sometimes 8, sometimes 6. a
record
had a different meaning to nos than to the cyber record manager (crm) .
it is possible to do a field upgrade from the one - processor 992 - 31 to the two - processor 992 - 32. up to 18 440 mbit / sec i / o units are available for accessing disks, tapes, other mainframes, and networks. there is a dual - ported interface to 1. 2 gbytes (formatted) capacity disks with a data transfer rate of 12 mbytes per second, an average seek time of 16 milliseconds, and an average latency of 8. 3 milliseconds. each iou can support up to 16 such drives. each iou also can interface to as many as 20 1. 1 gbyte capacity, 3 mbytes per second smd disks. there are connections to 10 mbit / sec ethernet using tcp / ip, cdc' s 50 mbit / sec. loosely coupled network (lcn) using rhf and a 50 mbit / sec hyperchannel using tcp / ip. the series can have a variety of front - ends including cdc, ibm, and dec. it can also operate stand - alone, with access from terminals and workstations via ethernet.
the cdc cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers ( except for the cyber 18 and cyber 1000 minicomputers ) were the primary products of control data corporation ( cdc ) during the 1970s and 1980s . in their day , they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing . they were used for modeling fluid flow , material science stress analysis , electrochemical machining analysis , probabilistic analysis , energy and academic computing , radiation shielding modeling , and other applications . like their predecessor , the cdc 6600 , they were unusual in using the ones ' complement binary representation . 
the cdc cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers (except for the cyber 18 and cyber 1000 minicomputers) were the primary products of control data corporation (cdc) during the 1970s and 1980s. in their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing. they were used for modeling fluid flow, material science stress analysis, electrochemical machining analysis, probabilistic analysis, energy and academic computing, radiation shielding modeling, and other applications. like their predecessor, the cdc 6600, they were unusual in using the ones' complement binary representation.
the cdc cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers (except for the cyber 18 and cyber 1000 minicomputers) were the primary products of control data corporation (cdc) during the 1970s and 1980s. in their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing. they were used for modeling fluid flow, material science stress analysis, electrochemical machining analysis, probabilistic analysis, energy and academic computing, radiation shielding modeling, and other applications. like their predecessor, the cdc 6600, they were unusual in using the ones' complement binary representation.