IBM Stretch Case Study

Decent Essays
IBM’s first attempt at creating a transistor based, advanced scientific computing machine lost the company nearly $30 million in the 60’s. Yet, it might have been the most revolutionary system ever. This paper will cover the Stretch project including:

History Although the transistor effect had been discovered in 1947 at Bell Labs (Spicer, 2000), vacuum tubes still were the industrial standard for years. It wasn’t until IBM was contracted by the United States Atomic Energy Commission in 1955 that it began using transistors in its computers. This new project was initially dubbed “Stretch” but later branded as the IBM Model 7030. Stretch’s designing phase kicked off in January of 1956. During this time, Stretch was designed to perform massive
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In 1960, IBM President Tom Watson stated that Stretch was "100 times faster than the most advanced computer working today." (Spicer, 2000) In May of 1961, the first Stretch was delivered and installed at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Stretch was seen as an overall success by its customers, boasting an astonishing reliability rate of 17 hours before failure. However, despite being the fasted computer in the world until 1964, it was viewed as a failure within IBM. This perception was due to Stretch failing to Watson’s “100 times faster” benchmark. This led to a price reduction from $13.5 million to $7.78 million, generating a net loss for every system delivered. (Spicer, 2000) As time went on, perception slowly changed regarding the Stretch project. Thanks to the advancements made in circuits, packaging, memory, and I/O made during this project, IBM was able to quickly develop its next generation systems. These systems were heavily composed of Stretch concepts and immensely successful. Thanks in part to Stretch’s architectural, instruction pipelining, arithmetic unit, and software innovations, IBM’s third generation systems were also very profitable. (Brooks, …show more content…
The speed of these disks was estimated by IBM at 1,250,000 alphabetic characters per second, read or write. (7030 Data Processing System, 1960) The Exchange acted like a switching center by routing information between the main core storage and as many as 32 channels, each handling multiple input-output devices. The arithmetic unit was notable because it was rated at well over 1,000,000 logical operations per second. (7030 Data Processing System, 1960) The Look-Ahead was a new component that was meant to anticipate instructions and data requirements resulting in boosted memory speeds. By anticipating future requirements, the Look-Ahead acted “as a reservoir, lining up instruction and data a fraction of a second before they were needed, to provide a continuous information stream to the arithmetic and logical units.” (7030 Data Processing System, 1960) FORTRAN, or formula translation, is a high level programming language used for programming scientific and mathematical applications. FORTRAN made the programming portion much easier for the user, saving them time and effort. Although FORTRAN was not developed for Stretch it was optimized and implemented more efficiently than ever before.

Computational

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