germany area served north america south america europe asia pacific founder s falk dietrich k bler gerhard peise bernd wolf services surface inspection systems website http www.parsytec.de available in german isra vision parsytec ag is a company of isra vision ag and was founded in 1985 as parsytec parallel system technology in aachen germany . parsytec has become known in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a manufacturer of transputer based parallel systems . products ranged from a single transputer plug in board for the ibm pc up to large massively parallel systems with thousands of transputers or processors respectively such as the parsytec gc . some sources call the latter ultracomputer sized scalable multicomputers smc . 1 2 as part of the isra vision ag today the company focusses on solutions in the machine vision and industrial image procession sector . the isra parsytec products are used for quality and surface inspection especially in the metal and paper industries . contents 1 history 2 products computers 2.1 megaframe 2.2 multicluster 2.3 supercluster 2.4 gigacluster 2.5 x plorer 2.6 cognitive computer 2.7 powermouse 2.8 operating system 3 see also 4 references 5 external links history edit headquarters of parsytec in aachen germany in 1985 parsytec was founded by falk dietrich k bler gerhard h. peise and bernd wolff in aachen germany with an 800000 dm grant from federal ministry for research and technology bmft . 3 in contrast to suprenum parsytec directly aimed their systems pattern recognition at industrial applications such as surface inspection . therefore they not only had a substantial market share in the european academia but they could also win quite a many industrial customers . this included many customers outside germany . in 1988 export accounted for roughly a third of parsytec s turnover . turnover figures were nil in 1985 1.5 m dm in 1986 5.2 m dm in 1988 9m dm in 1989 and 15m dm in 1990 17m usd in 1991 . in order to focus parsytec on research and development paracom was founded . paracom thence took care of the sales and marketing side of the business . parsytec paracom s headquarters were maintained in aachen germany however they had subsidiary sales offices in chemnitz germany southampton united kingdom chicago usa st petersburg russia and moscow russia . 4 in japan the machines were sold by matsushita . 3 between 1988 and 1994 parsytec built quite an impressive range of transputer based computers having its peak in the parsytec gc gigacluster which was available in versions using 64 up to 16384 transputers . 5 parsytec had its ipo in mid 1999 at the german stock exchange in frankfurt . on apr 30 2006 founder falk d. k bler left the company . 6 in july 2007 7 52.6 % 8 of the parsytec ag were acquired by isra vision ag . the delisting of parsytec shares from the stock market started december the same year . and since 18 april 2008 the parsytec share is no longer listed on the stock exchange . 9 whilst workforce at parsytec was roundabout 130 staff in the early 1990s the isra vision group had more than 500 employees in 2012 2013 . 10 today the core business of isra parsytec within the isra vision group is the development and distribution of surface inspection systems for strip products in the metal and paper industries . products computers edit parsytec s product range included megaframe t414 t800 one per board up to ten boards in a rack or as plug in boards multicluster t800 up to 64 processors in a single rack supercluster t800 16 to 1024 processors in a single frame gigacluster planned t9000 ; realized t800 or mpc 601 64 to 16384 processors in cubes x plorer t800 or mpc 601 cognitive computer mpc 604 and intel pentium pro powermouse mpc 604 in total some 700 stand alone systems sc and gc had been shipped . in the beginning parsytec had participated in the gpmimd general purpose mimd 11 project under the umbrella of the esprit 12 project both being funded by the european commission s directorate for science . however after substantial divisions with the other participants meiko parsys inmos and telmat as regards the choice of a common physical architecture parsytec left the project and announced a t9000 based machine of their own i.e. the gc . but due to inmos problems with the t9000 they were forced to change to the ensemble motorola mpc 601 cpus and inmos t805 . this led to parsytec s hybrid systems e.g. gc pp degrading transputers to communication processors whilst the compute work was offloaded to the powerpcs . parsytec s cluster systems were operated by an external workstation typically a sun workstation e.g. sun 4 13 . there is a substantial confusion as regards the names of the parsytec products . on the one hand this has to do with the architecture but on the other hand it had to do with the aforementioned non availability of inmos t9000 that forced parsytec to use the t805 and the powerpc instead . systems that were equipped with powerpc processors had the prefix power . for what concerns the architecture of gc systems an entire gigacluster is made up of self contained gigacubes . the basic architectural element of a parsytec system was a cluster which consisted inter alia of four transputers processors i.e. a cluster is a node in the classical sense . a gigacube sometimes referred to as supernode meganode 14 consisted of four clusters nodes with 16 inmos t805 transputers 30 mhz ram up to 4 mb per t805 plus a further redundant t805 an additional thus the 17th processor the local link connections and four inmos c004 routing chips . hardware fault tolerance was provided by linking each of the t805 to a different c004 . 15 the unusual spelling of x plorer led to xplorer and the gigacluster is sometimes referred to as the gigacube or grand challenge . megaframe edit parsytec megaframe workstation for medical imagery in 1990 megaframe 16 17 was the product name of a family of transputer based parallel processing modules . 18 some of which could be used to upgrade an ibm pc . 19 as a standalone system a megaframe system could hold up to ten processor modules . different versions of the modules were available for example one with a 32 bit transputer t414 floating point hardware motorola 68881 1 mb 80 nanosecond access time of ram and a throughput of 10 mips or one with four 16 bit transputers t22x with 64 kb of ram . also cards for special features were on offer such as a graphics processor with a resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels or i o cluster with terminal and scsi interface . 20 multicluster edit multicluster 1 series were statically configurable systems and could be tailored to specific user requirements such as number of processors amount of memory and i 0 configuration as weil as system topology . the required processor topology could be configured by using unilink connection ; fed through the special back plane . in addition four external sockets were provided . multicluster 2 used network configuration units ncus that provided flexible dynamically configurable interconnection networks . the multiuser envirorunent could support up to eight users by using parsytec s multiple virtual architecture software . the ncu design was based on the inmos crossbar switch the c004 which gives full crossbar connectivity for up to 16 transputers . each ncu made of c004s connected up to 96 unilinks that link internal as weil as external transputers and other i 0 subsystems . multicluster 2 provided the ability to configure a variety of fixed interconnection topologies such as tree or mesh structures . 14 supercluster edit supercluster picture had a hierarchical cluster based design . a basic unit was a 16 transputer t800 fully connected cluster ; larger systems had additional levels of ncus to form necessary connections . the network configuration manager ncm software controlled the ncus and dynamically established the required connections . each transputer could be equipped with 1 to 32 mb of dynamicic ram with single error correction and double error detection . 14 gigacluster edit the gigacluster gc was a parallel computer which was produced in the early 1990s . a giga cluster was made up of giga cubes . 21 being designed for the inmos t9000 transputers it could never be launched as such since the inmos t9000 transputers itself never made it to the market in good time . this led to the development of the gc pp powerplus in which two motorola mpc 601 80 mhz were used as the dedicated cpus supported by four transputers t805 30 mhz 22 whilst the gc pp was a hybrid system the gcel entry level was based on t805 only . 23 24 the gcel was supposed to be upgradeable to the t9000 transputers had they come early enough thus becoming a full gc . as the t9000 was inmos evolutionary successor of the t800 upgrading was planned to be simple and straightforward because firstly both transputers shared the same instruction set and secondly they also had quite a similar performance ratio of compute power versus communication throughput . therefore a theoretical a speed up factor of 10 was expected 21 but in the end it was never reached . the network structure of the gc was a two dimensional lattice with an inter communication speed between the nodes i.e. clusters in parsytec s lingo of 20 mbit s. for the time the concept of the gc was exceptionally modular and thus scalable . a so called gigacube was a module that was already a one gigaflop system ; furthermore it was the building block for greater systems . a module i.e. cube in parsytec s lingo contained four clusters of which each was equipped with 16 transputers plus a further transputer for redundancy thus making it 17 transputers per cluster 4 wormhole routing chips c104 for the planned t9000 and c004 with the realized t805 a dedicated power supply and communications ports . by combining modules or cubes respectively one could theoretically connect up to 16384 processors to a very powerful system together . typical installations were system number of cpus number of gigacubes gc 1 64 1 gc 2 256 4 gc 3 1024 16 gc 4 4096 48 gc 5 16384 256 the two largest installations of the gc which were actually shipped had 1024 processors 16 modules with 64 transputers per module and were operated at the data centers of the universities of cologne and paderborn . in october 2004 the latter had been given to the heinz nixdorf museums forum 25 where it is inoperable now . the power consumption of a system with 1024 processors was approximately 27 kw the weight was almost a ton . in 1992 the system priced about 1.5 m dm . while the smaller versions up to gc 3 were air cooled water cooling was mandatory for the larger systems . in 1992 a gc with 1024 processors reached a placement in the top500 list 26 of the world s fastest supercomputer installations . in germany alone it was number 22 of the fastest computers . in 1995 there were nine parsytec computers in the top500 list of which two gc pp 192 installations ranked 117 and 188 in the top500 list . 27 and in 1996 they still ranked 230 and 231 in the top500 list . 28 29 x plorer edit parsytec x plorer with a sun sparcstation as front end the x plorer model came in two versions the initial version was featuring 16 transputers each having access to 4mb ram and called just x plorer . later when parsytec generally switched to the ppc architecture it was called powerx plorer and featured 8 mpc 601 cpus