Mark Smotherman
last updated December 30, 2016
On August 3-7, 1965, full-scale planning for the ACS project began. The meeting was held at Arden House in Harriman, New York.
The presenters included:
Questions of S/360 compatibility, multiprocessing, and time-sharing were designated for "later study". Conclusions from the discussions were presented on Friday evening (August 7) to John Haanstra.
The Project Y presentation included these highlights:
A letter from Bengt Carlson (of Los Alamos) was discussed as part a review of the marketplace. The suggestions in the letter included:
In his presentation, Gene Amdahl stated that customers take short cuts in measuring systems and that the speed of the CPU, especially floating-point, is the most important aspect. With regard to parallel systems, he gave an analogy of two mountains: the system support problem and the user's computational problem. He felt both were about the same size and argued for a single processor rather than two or four smaller processors. (This material appears to be a preview of the argument in his famous 1967 conference paper.)
Amdahl went on to argue for a S/360-compatible design, which he felt would provide 90-95% of the Project Y machine performance for at most 5-10% more hardware. He asserted that the system support mountain would be easier to scale by leveraging S/360 compatibility. He also felt that an incompatible system would frighten the Model 92 customers, since there would be no growth path.
A. DiMarko discussed two phases of circuit development. A first phase would use an improved ACPX technology, and a second phase would use 1 nsec circuits with 30-50 circuits per chip. Phase 2 chips would be mounted on 5" x 5" cards and 16" x 16" boards, and the chips would need to be liquid cooled.
Harwood Kolsky recorded that during the summary presentation on Friday evening Haanstra was critical of most of the proposals. He felt that there was too much generalizing and too few specific programs, with the result being "not a good start" and "not hitting [the] nail yet". With regard to some of the points described above, Haanstra questioned the single processor approach and was not in favor of S/360 compatibility. He also told the group to not worry about prices and that the project should "get the best circuits all things considered".
See Harwood Kolsky, Notes from Arden House planning sessions, August 1965. (46pp, 3.8M pdf) Courtesy of the Computer History Museum.
1 48 bits was not an unusual word size for the time. For example, Los Alamos had designed the MANIAC II computer based on a 48-bit word and had been using it since 1957. By 1965 Livermore was using three CDC computers with 48-bit word size, a 1604 and two 3600s, as well as the 60-bit CDC 6600. Both labs also had experience with 36-bit words in the IBM 704/709 scientific computer line as well as the 64-bit word size in the IBM 7030 (Stretch). John Savard lists a number of other computers in the 1960s that had a 48-bit word size.
With regard to floating-point precision and accuracy, Robert Gregory in a 1966 article in IEEE Transactions on Electronic Computers wrote:
In April, 1961, a week-long international conference on matrix computations was held at Gatlinburg, Tenn., under the sponsorship of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. There was unanimous agreement among the participants at that conference that computer manufacturers should be urged to increase the word length on all future scientific computers to at least 48 bits.
The use of a 32-bit format for single-precision floating point along with choosing a base of 16 in the S/360 was not well received. See, for example, "The influence of machine design on numerical algorithms," by W.J. Cody of Argonne National Lab in the 1967 SJCC in which he compares floating-point errors in the CDC 3600 and IBM S/360. Cody introduced his paper by writing:
A great deal has been said and written recently about the poor arithmetic characteristics of computer designs, [original cites omitted] largely because anomalies long present in the floating point arithmetic of binary computers have suddenly been magnified in importance by the appearance of base 16 arithmetic.
Andres Padegs in "System/360 and beyond," in the 25th Anniversary issue of IBM JRD states:
Both the 32-bit and 64-bit [floating-point] formats use the same exponent size, with a base of 16. This was a departure from base 2 and was introduced to permit simpler circuitry and to reduce the frequency of pre-shift, overflow, and precision-loss post-shift in addition and subtraction.... The original System/360 architecture did not anticipate the significance of compatibility in the handling of overflow and the need for indicating the true result value on both overflow and underflow. Furthermore, it had overlooked the need for a guard digit in post-normalization. Both of these functions were changed in 1968, with all installed machines retrofitted.
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