Meiko Scientific

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(Redirected from Meiko Computing Surface)

Meiko Scientific Ltd. was a British supercomputer company based in Bristol, founded by members of the design team working on the INMOS transputer microprocessor. When, in late 1985, INMOS management suggested the release of the transputer be delayed, Miles Chesney, David Alden, Eric Barton, Roy Bottomley, James Cownie and Gerry Talbot resigned and formed Meiko (Japanese for "well-engineered") to start work on massively-parallel machines based on the processor. Nine weeks later they demonstrated a transputer system at the SIGGRAPH in San Francisco in July 1985, which was launched in 1986 as the Meiko Computing Surface. By 1990, Meiko had sold more than 300 systems and grown to 125 employees.

The original Computing Surface (sometimes retrospectively referred to as the CS-1) architecture was comprised of multiple boards containing T414 transputers connected together using their communications links, running a Unix-like operating system known as MeikOS. The T414s were later replaced with the more capable T800 transputer as these became available from 1987 onwards.

In 1988, Meiko launched the In-Sun Computing Surface system, which repackaged the Computing Surface into VME boards suitable for installation in larger Sun systems. This allowed the Sun to act as a "front end". Users could then program using tools running under SunOS, which would be uploaded and run automatically.

As the speed of the transputer fell in relation to the other RISC chips on the market towards the end of the 1980s (the follow-on T9000 transputer being beset with delays) Meiko added the ability to supplement the transputers with Intel i860 processors. Each i860 board contained two i860s with up to 32 MB of RAM each, and two T800s providing inter-processor communication. Sometimes known as the Concerto or CS i860, the system was not very popular. Meiko also produced SPARC processor boards, which provided compatibility with Sun systems, running the SunOS operating system. These were usually used as "front-end" host processors for transputer or i860 Computing Surfaces.

A major drawback of the Computing Surface architecture was poor I/O bandwidth for general data shuffling. Although aggregate bandwidth for special case data shuffling could be very high, the general case has very poor performance relative to the compute bandwidth. This made the Meiko Computing Surface uneconomic for many applications.

In 1993, Meiko launched their second-generation CS-2 system. This was an all-new architecture based around SuperSPARC (later hyperSPARC) processors running Solaris and, optionally, Fujitsu μVP vector processors, connected by 50 MB/s bi-directional links and crossbar switches implemented in custom silicon.

Meiko ran into financial difficulties in the mid-1990s and the Meiko technical team and technology was transferred to a joint venture company called Quadrics formed with Alenia Spazio in mid-1996. At Quadrics, the CS-2 interconnect technology was developed into QsNet. As of late 2004, Meiko's website is up, though limited to customers.

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References

  • Arthur Trew and Greg Wilson (eds.) (1991). Past, Present, Parallel: A Survey of Available Parallel Computing Systems. New York: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-19664-1.
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