mpickering
December 18th, 2006, 08:03 PM
Hi all,
I have the opportunity to acquire a partial (no PSU, no front panel) Floating Point System AP-120B array processor. For those of you who don't know what that is, it is essentially a mini-supercomputer geared to fast floating point calculations. It was hooked up to another computer (mini or mainframe) to augment its processing power. It required the host computer to feed it instructions and data. This model was used in the late 70s and early 80s as a cheap alternative to a Cray. A blistering 6 MIPS and vector processing capabilities thrown in. At one time, five of these units were yoked to a S/370 to form one of the National Centers for Supercomputing systems (of which five were created by the NSF and the only site that didn't use a conventional super at its core).
The cost is reasonable (I can probably get it for $50 with a little patience). I have some technical documentation (thank you Bitsavers!) but I really need to know if this is worth getting. I like it for the sheer novelty factor but I would really like to get it operational. I have only read about the AP-120B and this is the first one I have ever seen. I suspect they are extremely rare nowadays. I think a complete one would be worthy of a musuem display next to a VAX or System/370.
I don't mind getting it for the sheer sake of having it. It is probably the closest I'll get to a Cray. :) And with a PDP-11 I am getting next year, it might be an interesting project if I can find the bits needed to get it up and running.
Anyone have any experience with these things? Worthy project?
Matt
I have the opportunity to acquire a partial (no PSU, no front panel) Floating Point System AP-120B array processor. For those of you who don't know what that is, it is essentially a mini-supercomputer geared to fast floating point calculations. It was hooked up to another computer (mini or mainframe) to augment its processing power. It required the host computer to feed it instructions and data. This model was used in the late 70s and early 80s as a cheap alternative to a Cray. A blistering 6 MIPS and vector processing capabilities thrown in. At one time, five of these units were yoked to a S/370 to form one of the National Centers for Supercomputing systems (of which five were created by the NSF and the only site that didn't use a conventional super at its core).
The cost is reasonable (I can probably get it for $50 with a little patience). I have some technical documentation (thank you Bitsavers!) but I really need to know if this is worth getting. I like it for the sheer novelty factor but I would really like to get it operational. I have only read about the AP-120B and this is the first one I have ever seen. I suspect they are extremely rare nowadays. I think a complete one would be worthy of a musuem display next to a VAX or System/370.
I don't mind getting it for the sheer sake of having it. It is probably the closest I'll get to a Cray. :) And with a PDP-11 I am getting next year, it might be an interesting project if I can find the bits needed to get it up and running.
Anyone have any experience with these things? Worthy project?
Matt