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EE Testing Next Generation of Gould Computer

On June 26, 1987, the first of the next generation Gould computers to leave the company arrived in EE room 56 to begin BETA (preproduction) testing. The machine is called the "NP-1" (N-Processor-1).

Purdue was chosen as a test site due to our reputation for pushing computers to the limit and beyond; some say, we push our computers the hardest of any facility in the world. The purpose of BETA testing is to identify problems, bottlenecks, and gain "hands on" experience in a real user environment. There will no doubt be many crashes, and many down times during the debugging period of about one year.

Current configuration of the the NP-1 is two approximately 10 MIP CPUs, 64MB of main memory, and four 474MB "eagle" disks. During the school year, it is expected that the memory will be increased to 256MB and a vector processor/accelerator will be added. When finished, it is hoped the NP-1 will run about twice the speed of the current Gould 9080s and have sixteen times the memory.

Anybody with an ECN account is welcome to use the NP-1 (ECN host: en.ecn.purdue.edu) during the BETA test period. There will be things which don't work, some things which work slowly, and some things which work very quickly. Gould would like feedback on problem areas, as well as things which are working well. You can share your experiences by E-mailing your comments to "mail np1bugs". For up-to-date information on obtaining a NP-1 account and other machine news, type:

                        help ecnnews/np1

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