"ucsb?
started in 63. first project on a ibm 1620.
glen culler was hot. take any classes from him?"
No classes from Glen Culler, though I was in a math seminar with his son Marc (now a math professor, in topology). I was in Physics.
Culler was the guy who got the on-line terminals for the ArpaNet project, though. He had a company you probably know about, Culler-Fried.
For you other folks, Culler and his partners designed the floating point processor system which was later sold by Floating Point Systems of Beaverton, OR as the famous "AP-120B." As famous in its day as the Nvidia system is today. Just the thing for VAXen.
I may not have all of the details right, as it gets complicated, but here goes: I believe FPS acquired or designed a system using mulltiple SPARCs. FPS was then acquired by Cray Research, which in turn was acquired by Silicon Graphics (SGI). Since SGI made the MIPS processor, not the SPARC, the FPS division was sold or swapped to Sun, which used the FPS/SPARC/Cray product line as the basis of its very successful multi-CPU line.
So, in a sense Glen Culler was a kind of iintellectual parent to the current line of Sun supercomputers.
--Tim May |
