Ardent

Status

Unknown.

Overview of Organization

The company was founded by Allen Michels (from Convergent Tech) in November 1985, and was originally called Dana Computer Incorporated. Financed by venture capital and Kubota Ltd. of Japan, a $2.5 billion worldwide industrial equipment manufacturer.

Heavy emphasis on interactive graphics for large computational problems. Graphics boards are integrated with system and many graphics calculations can be done in vector units.

Platforms Documented

Titan

Contact Address

Ardent Computer Corporation
880 West Maude Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
408-732-0400;     FAX 408-732-2806

European Office
Ardent Computer Limited
Brooke House Market Square
Aylesbury
Bucks HP20 1SN
UK
(0296) 89911;   FAX (0296) 87123;   Telex 838811 BROOKE

Ardent Titan

Overview of Platform

Vector Register, Shared-Memory Parallel Architecture - Graphics Supercomputer

Compute Hardware

One to four processors are connected to a shared memory of between 8 and 128 Mbytes through a 256 Mbyte/sec bus. There are ten slots on the bus, of which six are available for memory boards or CPU boards. Each CPU has a MIPS chip scalar unit rated at 16 mips with a 16 Kbyte instruction cache and a 16 Kbyte data cache. The vector unit uses a custom designed chip with divide, a pipelined multiplier, and a pipelined adder/subtracter as independent arithmetic function units. Data is streamed from shared memory direct to the vector registers via 1 store and 2 load pipes. The vector registers are 8192 words long and can be configured in any mode between 8192 registers of one word each to 32 registers each of 256 words. Each word is 64-bits long. The clock cycle time is 62.5 nsec, and each vector processor is rated at 16 Mflops, giving a maximum potential of 64 Mflops. Gather/scatter is supported by the hardware. Memory uses 1 Mbit chips, and each memory board contains 8, 16, or 32 Mbytes. Interleaving is 8-way on odd boards and 16-way on paired boards of the same size. A maximum of four boards can be used. Access rate is 256 Mbyte/sec. A major feature of the Titan is its integrated graphics support. Up to two graphics boards can be attached to the bus and are powerful processors in their own right. All pixel manipulation is done on the graphics boards minimizing traffic between them and the vector processors, which can be employed on related or independent computation to the graphics processing. Graphics is supported by PHIGS+ and CGI as well as Ardent's own software package called "Dore" (Dynamic Object Rendering Environment), which handles image representations from wire-frame through flat and smooth-shading to global ray tracing.

Interconnect / Communications System

No information available.

Memory System

No information available.

Benchmarks / Compute and data transfer performance

The performance on the LINPACK (100 x 100) benchmark on one processor is over 6 Mflops, with 24 Mflops performance on two processors for the 1000 x 1000 LINPACK test. The maximum possible computational rate is 64 Mflops.

Operating System Software and Environment

The operating system is fully compatible with the standard AT&T System V.3 UNIX operating system and Berkeley 4.3 Unix with enhancements for communications, high I/O bandwidth, and large applications. Asynchronous reads and a fast file transfer of 1000 Kbyte/sec using disk striping are also supported.

Vectorizing and parallelizing compilers are available for both Fortran and C and generate a common intermediate form for subsequent code generation. Standard Fortran 77 is supported along with extensions compatible with the VAX/VMS extensions. CRAY vectorizing directives are also recognized. The parallelism which is automatically detected by the compiler is fine-grained microtasking and several multitasking primitives are also supported. A symbolic debugger, much extended from the basic UNIX debugger, is available. Both 32 and 64-bit floating-point arithmetic is supported, and the arithmetic conforms to the IEEE standard 754.

Networkability/ I/O System / Integrability / Reliability / Scalability

Standard interfaces to LANs and I/O devices are supported through an I/O board connected to a single bus slot. The I/O board supports two 4 Mbyte/sec SCSI channels, a keyboard, a mouse, Ethernet, 4 RS-232 ports, and 1 parallel port and can be fitted with a 15 Mbyte/sec VME bus adapter for SMD and other devices, such as knob-boxes, tablets, and stereo viewers.

All packaged systems include a 380 Mbyte hard disk, 1/4" cartridge tape, operating system, TCP/IP, C compiler, linker/debugger, Dor\'{e}, X-windows V.11 and UNIX Navigator, a user interface based on visual agents in the same style as Apple's Macintosh and DRI's GEM, together with a tutorial version of Smalltalk 80, 32 plane graphics subsystem, 19" 1024 x 1024 color monitor, 50 ft video cable, keyboard, mouse, Ethernet connectors, and four RS 232 connectors.

Notable Applications / Customers / Market Sectors

Application agreements are being reached with companies supplying a wide range of applications software. Areas included are Mechanical CAE (NISA, DYNA3D), CFD (PLOT3D, ARC2D, KIVA, NEKTON, VSAERO, FLO87, PHOENICS), Computer-aided molecular design (BIOGRAF, GAUSSIAN 86, MOPAC, AMPAC, AMBER, CHARRM, BIOSYM, and COSMIC), Seismic (LANDMARK), Animation (WAVEFRONT), and Mathematical software (IMSL, NAG, MATHADVANTAGE, MATLAB, LINPACK, EISPACK).

Markets areas: CAD/CAM/CAE; Molecular Modelling; Image Processing; Scientific/Engineering Research and Development; Computational Fluid Dynamics.

Beta test sites in 1987. General delivery of one- and two-processor machines both in the United States and worldwide by May/June 1988, and four-processor machines in 4Q 1988.

Overall Comments

A good graphics engine in its day.

hawick@npac.syr.edu

saleh@npac.syr.edu