FROSTBURG on display at the National Cryptologic Museum. The light panels were used to check the usage of the processing nodes, and to run diagnostics.

FROSTBURG was a Connection Machine 5 (CM-5) massively parallel supercomputer used by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to perform higher-level mathematical calculations. The CM-5 was built by the Thinking Machines Corporation, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at a cost of US$25 million. The system was installed at NSA in 1991, and operated until 1997.[1] It was the first massively parallel processing computer bought by NSA, originally containing 256 processing nodes. The system was upgraded in 1993 with another 256 nodes, for a total of 512 nodes.[2] The system had a total of 500 billion 32-bit words (≈ 2 terabytes) of storage, 2.5 billion words (≈ 10 gigabytes) of memory, and could perform at a theoretical maximum 65.5 gigaFLOPS. The operating system CMost was based on Unix, but optimized for parallel processing.

FROSTBURG is now on display at the National Cryptologic Museum.[3]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Ten of the coolest and most powerful supercomputers of all time". Royal.pingdom.com. 2009-06-11. Retrieved 2014-02-25.
  2. ↑ Graham-Cumming, John (2009-05-21). The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive - John Graham-Cumming - Google Boeken. ISBN 9780596555627. Retrieved 2014-02-25.
  3. ↑ Caption for FROSTBURG display in the National Cryptologic Museum, 2005
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