Editing ETA Systems

{{More citations needed|date=July 2011}}
{{Infobox company
| name = ETA Systems
| logo = File:ETA Systems wordmark.svg
| type = <!-- Public or Private -->
| industry = Computers
| founded = {{Start date and age|1983|08}}<ref>{{cite book|chapter-url=https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-83221-5_3|title=Nuclear Simulation|publisher=Springer-Verlag|doi=10.1007/978-3-642-83221-5_3|last=Swanson|first=C. D.|chapter=The ETA10 Supercomputer System |year=1987 |pages=13–23 |isbn=978-3-642-83223-9 }}</ref>
| defunct = {{End date|1989}}
| hq_location_city = [[Bloomington, Minnesota]]
| hq_location_country = United States
| products = [[ETA10|ETA-10]]
| owner = [[William Norris (CEO)|William Norris]]
| num_employees = 
| num_employees_year = <!-- Year of num_employees data (if known) -->
| parent = [[Control Data Corporation]]
}}
'''ETA Systems''' was a [[supercomputer]] company spun off from [[Control Data Corporation]] (CDC) in the early 1980s in order to regain a footing in the supercomputer business. They successfully delivered the [[ETA-10]], but lost money continually while doing so. CDC management eventually gave up and folded the company.

==Historical development==
[[Seymour Cray]] left CDC in the early 1970s when they refused to continue funding of his [[CDC 8600]] project. Instead they continued with the [[CDC STAR-100]] while Cray went off to build the [[Cray-1]]. Cray's machine was much faster than the STAR, and soon CDC found itself pushed out of the supercomputing market.

[[William Norris (CEO)|William Norris]] was convinced the only way to regain a foothold would be to spin off a division that would be free from management prodding. In order to regain some of the small-team flexibility that seemed essential to progress in the field, ETA was created in 1983 with the mandate to build a 10&nbsp;[[GFLOPS]] machine by 1986.

In April 1989 CDC decided to shut down the ETA operation and keep a bare-bones continuation effort alive at CDC. At shutdown, 7 liquid-cooled and 27 air-cooled machines had been sold.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Booker |first1=Ellis |title=CDC supercomputer swan song |work=Computerworld |date=24 April 1989}}</ref> At this point ETA had the best [[price/performance ratio]] of any supercomputer on the market, and its initial software problems appeared to be finally sorted out. Nevertheless, shortly thereafter CDC exited the supercomputer market entirely, giving away remaining ETA machines free to high schools through the [[SuperQuest]] [[computer science]] competition.

==Products==
ETA had only one product, the [[ETA10|ETA-10]]. It was a derivative of the [[CDC Cyber 205]] supercomputer, and deliberately kept compatibility with it. Like the Cyber 205, the ETA-10 did not use [[vector processor|vector registers]] as in the [[Cray Research|Cray]] machines, but instead used pipelined memory operations to a high-bandwidth [[main memory]]. The basic layout was a shared-memory multiprocessor with up to 8 [[Central processing unit|CPUs]], each capable of 4 double-precision or 8 single-precision operations per clock cycle, and up to 18 [[I/O processor]]s.

The main reason for the ETA-10's speed was the use of [[liquid nitrogen]] (LN<sub>2</sub>) cooling in some models to cool the CPUs. Even though it was based on then-current [[CMOS]] technologies, the low temperature allowed the CPUs to operate with a ~7&nbsp;ns cycle time, so a fully loaded ETA-10 was capable of about 9.1 GFLOPS. The design goal had been 10&nbsp;GFLOPS, so the design was technically a failure. Two LN<sub>2</sub>-cooled models were designated '''ETA-10E''' and '''ETA-10G'''.  Two slower, lower-cost air-cooled versions, the '''ETA-10Q''' and '''ETA-10P''' (code named "Piper") were also marketed.<ref>Pricing for the air-cooled systems began at a then unheard of $1,000,000. In fact, they could be purchased and operated at a lower cost than the cost to operate and maintain a low end Cray 1 or Cray-XMP.

What set apart ETA Systems supercomputers and the Cray system was their ability to expand primary memory far beyond that of the Cray machines. Cray had a competitive performance advantage in the scalar processing arena whereas ETA, using large lower cost memory and pipelining hardware design, simply decimated the Cray products where large data sets were in use; requirements such as oil reservoir data analysis and aerodynamic simulations. Operating software at ETA was a major stumbling block to the overall product success. Purdue University successfully installed a copy of UNIX on their ETA-10P. Unfortunately, it was all too late as ETA's parent company, CDC, was rapidly disintegrating and without the funds to continue, ETA Systems died on the vine. Richard Rychtarik Author - Piper Strategic Plan - ETA Systems 3/3/1987.</ref>

The planned successor to the ETA-10 was the 30&nbsp;GFLOPS ETA-30.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Hockney |first1=R.W. |last2=Josshope |first2=C.R. |title=Parallel Computers: Architecture, Programming and Algorithms |date=1988 |publisher=Adam Hilger |page=185 |edition=2}}</ref>

==Software==
[[Software]] for the ETA-10 line was initially regarded as a disaster. When CDC and ETA first designed the ETA architecture, they made the conscious decision not to merely port the CDC VSOS operating system from the existing CDC Cyber 205.  It was felt by both the vendor, and the existing customer base (who wrongly believed that their vendor knew best), that a new OS needed to be written to extract the best performance from the hardware.

When the first ETA-10 E initially shipped in 1986 there was no [[operating system]] for the machines. Programs had to be loaded one at a time from an attached [[Apollo Computer]] [[workstation]], run, and then the supercomputer rebooted to run the next program.

At the time [[Unix]] was making major inroads into the supercomputing fields, but ETA decided to write their own [[EOS (operating system)|EOS]] operating system, which wasn't ready when the first machines were delivered in late 1986 and early 1987. An operating system based on [[UNIX]] [[System V]] became available in 1988, as a result of porting work done under contract by the Canadian firm [[HCR Corporation]],<ref>{{cite news <!--BD https://www.cbronline.com/news/human_computing_resources_and_eta_systems_are_still_working_together --> | title=Human Computing Resources and ETA Systems Are Still Working Together |work=Computergram International | publisher=Computer Business Review | date=14 July 1987}}</ref> at which point it looked like the machine might finally succeed. Many sites that had refused to pay for their machines due to the low quality of EOS found ETA's UNIX completely usable and were willing to accept delivery.

ETA's demise was not based solely on operating system choice or existence.  The [[Fortran]] compiler (ftn200) had not changed significantly from the CDC205.  This compiler retained vendor-specific programming performance features (known as the Q8* subroutine calls) in an era when supercomputer users were realizing the necessity of source code portability between architectures.  Additionally, the [[compiler optimization]]s were not keeping up with existing technology as shown by the Japanese supercomputer vendors such as NEC, or at [[Cray|Cray Research]] and the newer minisupercomputer makers.

In general, computer hardware manufacturers prior and up to that period tended to be weak on software.  Libraries and available commercial and non-commercial (soon to be called [[open-source software|open-source]]) applications help an installed base of machines.  CDC was relatively weak in this area.

==Naming the Firm==
Neil Lincoln, chief architect, asserts that ETA is not an acronym, and otherwise means nothing, not even the well known acronym of "estimated time of arrival." In point of fact, he says that he would not have named the firm that so as to dissociate it from, [[ETA (separatist group)|ETA]], the Basque separatist group, or the ''[[Burakumin|Eta]]'', the Japanese social minority (especially as Japan was considered a market). According to one of the CPU designers at ETA, Neil told a story that his sons actually came up with the name: apparently a [[linotype machine]] has characters arranged in the [[Letter frequency#Relative frequencies of letters in the English language|order of frequency]] used in the English language and the first three letters were used. {{Citation needed|date=December 2021}}

Another theory asserts the name was chosen based on the frequency of English alphabet letters due in part to the then current popularity of [[Douglas Hofstadter]]'s 1980 book [[Gödel, Escher, Bach]] which used ETAOIN, etc., to capitalize on popularity and current hip-ness.

A third, completely plausible theory, is that ETA was a successor name to the much earlier [[Engineering Research Associates]] ERA: Engineering Technology Associates. Norris and others have denied this.

==See also==
*[[Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology]] won one of the donated ETA-10 supercomputers
*[[EOS (Operating System)|EOS]] was the initial [[operating system]] developed by ETA Systems
*[[Unix]] was the later, more popular operating system

==References==
{{reflist}}

==Further reading==
Thorndyke, Lloyd (1994), [https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft0f59n73z&chunk.id=d0e15697&toc.id=&brand=ucpress "The Demise of ETA Systems"], in Karyn R. Ames; Alan Brenner (eds.), ''Frontiers of Supercomputing II: A National Reassessment'', pp. 489&ndash;496. A personal account of ETA Systems' history by its CEO.

==External links==
*[http://www.museumwaalsdorp.nl/computer/en/eta10p.html Computer history TNO location The Hague/Waalsdorp: the ETA10-P] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20051127010350/http://www.museumwaalsdorp.nl/computer/en/eta10p.html |date=2005-11-27 }}
*[http://yarchive.net/comp/eta_peglar.html The ETA Saga]

{{Control Data Corporation}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Eta Systems}}
[[Category:American companies established in 1983]]
[[Category:American companies disestablished in 1989]]
[[Category:Computer companies established in 1983]]
[[Category:Computer companies disestablished in 1989]]
[[Category:Control Data Corporation]]
[[Category:Defunct computer companies of the United States]]
[[Category:Defunct computer hardware companies]]
[[Category:Defunct computer systems companies]]
[[Category:History of electronic engineering]]