The C3800 belonged to the C3 series which included the Convex C3200, C3400, C3800 scallable supercomputers. Scallable means that the computer power scales up with the number of installed processors and the amount of shared memory. Such systems were also made by IBM, Cray, HP.
The Convex 3800 used advanced technology gallium arsenide gate arrays. The Basic system held two processors, 512 Mbytes of RAM and 34 GB of disk capacity. It was air-cooled. Its higher speed was of 240 Mflops (Millions of floating-point operations per second) in 64-bit and 480 Mflops in 32-bit computations.
Fully configured with 8 processors and 4 gigabytes of RAM (pictured configuration), the monster could hit a speed of 2 gigaflops.
Such performance enabled scientists to study problems involving very high speed calculations and quantities of data that posed severe problems on smaller systems.
Convex computers were widely used for visualisation in computational fluid dynamics, medicine, computer-aided engineering, petroleum and seismic exploration, and finance.
The Convex OS was an Unix variant which managed the specific features of the beast: processor allocation, memory caching, storage capabilities, etc. Major language compilers were C, Ada and Fortran.
Thanks to Mattias Persson who provided us with the Convex brochures.
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To think that a new modern graphics card like the top of the line Nvidia Quadro can carry out floating point math that will make this ''super computer'' look like Sinclair zx81!
Sunday 21st December 2014
Chuck Rose (USA)
To think that a new modern graphics card like the top of the line Nvidia Quadro can carry out floating point math that will make this ''super computer'' look like Sinclair zx81!
Sunday 21st December 2014
Chuck Rose (USA)
NAME
C3800
MANUFACTURER
Convex Computer Corp.
TYPE
Professional Computer
ORIGIN
U.S.A.
YEAR
1991
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
None
KEYBOARD
Video terminal
CPU
2 to 8 processors
SPEED
240 Mflops to 2 Gflops
RAM
512 MB to 4 GB
TEXT MODES
Depending on the video terminal used
GRAPHIC MODES
Ditto
SIZE / WEIGHT
178 (H) x 201-328 (W) x 224 (D) cm / 1270 to 2631 kg
I/O PORTS
At least 8 x 80 Mbytes/sec PBUS slots, Integrated Disc Channel (IDC), Tape Library Interface (TLI)
BUILT IN MEDIA
From 34 GB hard disk
OS
Convex OS
POWER SUPPLY
Power consumption from 19.8 to 57.2 KVA - Forced air cooling
