ETA Systems
ETA Systems was a supercomputer company spun off from Control Data Corporation (CDC) in the early 1980s in order to regain a footing in the supercomputer business. They successfully delivered the ETA-10, but lost money continually while doing so. CDC management eventually gave up and folded the company.
Seymour Cray left CDC in the early 1970s when they refused to continue funding of his CDC 8600 project. Instead they continued with the CDC STAR-100 while Cray went off to build the Cray-1. Cray's machine was much faster than the STAR, and soon CDC found itself pushed out of the supercomputing market.
William Norris was convinced the only way to regain a foothold would be to spin off a division that would be free from management prodding. In order to regain some of the small-team flexibility that seemed essential to progress in the field, ETA was created in 1983 with the mandate to build a 10GFLOPS machine by 1986.
ETA had only one product, the ETA-10. It was essentially a modernized version of the CDC Cyber-205 computer, and deliberately kept compatibility with it. Like the Cyber series, the ETA-10 did not use vector registers as in the Cray machines, but instead used pipelined memory operations to a high-bandwidth main memory. The basic layout was a shared-memory multiprocessor with up to 8 CPUs (and up to 16 I/O processors), each capable of 4 double-precision or 8 single-precision operations per clock cycle.
The main reason for the ETA-10's speed was the use of a liquid nitrogen cooling in some models to cool the logic components. Even though it was based on then-current CMOS technologies, the cooling allowed the CPUs to operate on a ~7ns cycle, so a fully loaded ETA-10 was capable of about 9.1 GFLOPS. The design goal had been 10 GFLOPS, so the design was technically a failure. Two LN2-cooled models were designated ETA-10E and ETA-10G. Two slower, lower-cost air-cooled versions, the ETA-10Q and ETA-10P (code named "Piper") were also marketed.
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