Elbrus (computer)

From Free net encyclopedia

Elbrus (ЭЛЬБРУС) is the name (after the mountain) of a series of Soviet supercomputer systems developed in Russia by Elbrus MCST and/or ITMiVT since the 1970s; its current models are compatible with U.S.-developed SPARC designs.

Elbrus 1 (1973) was the first Russian integrated circuit computer, and the first fourth generation Soviet computer, developed by Vsevolod Burtsev. Used tags-based architecture and ALGOL as system language like Burroughs B5000. It was used by the Defense Ministry. A side development was an update of the 1965 BESM-6 as Elbrus-1K2.
Elbrus 2 (1977) was a 10-processor computer, considered the first Soviet supercomputer, with superscalar RISC processors. Re-implementation of the Elbrus 1 architecture with the fast ECL chips. It was used in the space program, nuclear weapons research, and defense systems.
Elbrus 3 (1986) was a 16-processor computer developed by Boris Babaian. Completly different from the Elbrus 1 and Elbrus 2 architecture, deploys VLIW architecture.
Elbrus 2000 or E2K was a vaporware project to implement Elbrus 3 architecture as a microprocessor.
The current SPARC-like systems have been developed from 1996 with the Elbrus-90micro and the company was formed under an agreement with Sun Microsystems in 1997. The company reported in 1998 the development of an innovative EPIC processor dubbed E2K by a team under Boris Babaian; little has been heard further as of 2003.
Elbrus 3m is a working implementaion of the Elbrus 2000, 300MHz