Convex Computer
This article possibly contains original research. (November 2010) |
Private | |
Industry | Supercomputers |
---|---|
Founded | 1982Richardson, Texas | in
Founder |
|
Defunct | 1995 |
Fate | Acquired by Hewlett-Packard |
Convex Computer Corporation was a company that developed, manufactured and marketed vector minisupercomputers and supercomputers for small-to-medium-sized businesses. Their later Exemplar series of parallel computing machines were based on the Hewlett-Packard (HP) PA-RISC microprocessors, and in 1995, HP bought the company. Exemplar machines were offered for sale by HP for some time, and Exemplar technology was used in HP's V-Class machines.
History
Convex was formed in 1982 by Bob Paluck and
Their first machine was the C1, released in 1985. The C1 was very similar to the
The C2 was a crossbar-interconnected
The C2 was followed by the C3 in 1991, being essentially similar to the C2 but with a faster clock and support for up to eight CPUs implemented with low-density GaAs FPGAs. Various configurations of the C3 were offered, with 50 to 240 MFLOPS per CPU. However, the C3 and the Convex business model were overtaken by changes in the computer industry. The arrival of RISC microprocessors meant that it was no longer possible to develop cost-effective high-performance computing as a standalone small low-volume company. While the C3 was delivered late, which resulted in lost sales, it was still not going to be able to compete with commodity high-performance computing in the long run.
Another speed boost used in the C3 and C4, which moved the hardware implementation to GaAs-based chips, following an evolution identical to that of the Cray machines, but the effort was too little, too late. Some considered the whole C4 program to be nothing more than chasing a business in decline.[according to whom?] By this time, even though Convex was the first vendor to ship a GaAs based product, they were losing money.
In 1994, Convex introduced an entirely new design, known as the Exemplar. Unlike the C-series vector computer, the Exemplar was a parallel-computing machine that used HP
In 1995, Hewlett-Packard bought Convex. HP sold Convex Exemplar machines under the S-Class (MP) and X-Class (CC-NUMA) titles, and later incorporated some of Exemplar's technology into the V-Class machine, which was released running the HP-UX 11.0 release instead of the SPP-UX version which was sold with the S- and X-Class products.
References
- Patterson, David A. (Fall 1996). "Lecture 6: Vector Processing"(PDF). p. 8. Retrieved 2011-04-29.
- .
External links
- Convex ex-employees website
- Faught, Danny. "Convex is Dead, Long Live Convex". Feature Article. Archived from the original on 2003-08-06.