MasPar

MasPar Computer Corporation was a minisupercomputer vendor that was founded in 1987 by Jeff Kalb. The company was based in Sunnyvale, California.

While Kalb was the vice-president of the division of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) that built integrated circuits, some researchers in that division were building a supercomputer based on the Goodyear MPP (massively parallel processor) supercomputer. The DEC researchers enhanced the architecture by:

After Digital decided not to commercialize the research project, Kalb decided to start a company to sell this minisupercomputer. In 1990, the first generation product MP-1 was delivered. In 1992, the follow-on MP-2 was shipped. The company shipped more than 200 systems.

MasPar along with nCUBE criticized the open government support, by DARPA, of competitors Intel for their hypercube Personal SuperComputers (iPSC) and the Thinking Machines Connection Machine on the pages of Datamation.

Samples of MasPar MPs, from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, are in storage at the Computer History Museum.

MasPar offered a family of SIMD machines, second sourced by DEC. The processor units are proprietary.

There was no MP-3. MasPar exited the computer hardware business in June 1996, halting all hardware development and transforming itself into a new data mining software company called NeoVista Software. NeoVista was acquired by Accrue Software in 1999, which in turn sold the division to JDA Software in 2001.

MasPar is unique in being a manufacturer of SIMD supercomputers (as opposed to vector machines). In this approach, a collection of ALU's listen to a program broadcast from a central source. The ALUs can do their own data fetch, but are all under control of a central Array Control Unit. There is a central clock. The emphasis is on communications efficiency, and low latency. The MasPar architecture is designed to scale, and balance processing, memory, and communication.

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