Caltech Cosmic Cube

The Caltech Cosmic Cube was a parallel computer, developed by Charles Seitz and Geoffrey C Fox from 1981 onward.[1] It was the first working hypercube built.[2]

It was an early attempt to capitalise on VLSI to speed up scientific calculations at a reasonable cost. Using commodity hardware and an architecture suited to the specific task (QCD), Fox and Seitz demonstrated that this was indeed possible.

In 1984 a group at Intel including Justin Rattner and Cleve Moler developed the Intel iPSC inspired by the Cosmic Cube.[3] In 1987 several people in the group formed a company called Parasoft to commercialize the message passing interface developed for the Cosmic Cube.[4]

  1. ^ Cosmic Cubism from Engineering & Science, March 1984 http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3419/1/Cubism.pdf
  2. ^ Anderson, A. John (1994). Foundations of Computer Technology. CRC Press. p. 378. ISBN 978-0412598104.
  3. ^ Cleve Moler (October 28, 2013). "The Intel Hypercube, part 1". Retrieved November 4, 2013.
  4. ^ History of Supercomputing