Page 14 - Kotov

Let 100 Flowers Bloom: Special and Unusual
Time Frame
After the first wave of general-purpose computers had proved their ability to
solve complex mathematical problems, computer designers started to look
how to expand their spectrum of applications and use them to monitor the
airspace, to control technological processes, to process textual information,
etc..So, a variety projects of new computers of different power, style, and spe-
cialization has been started in Moscow, Minsk, Kazan, Kiev, Yerevan, Vilnius,
Severodonetsk, and other places.
To solve those special problems with minimal cost, specialized computers
were designed. A Soviet missile early
warning station
Also, the first computers amazed and attracted attention of many Russian math-
ematicians. Mathematics (like chess) was the favorite Russian science for years, as it did not required substantial
material and financial resources, just good brains that were in abundance. And here were coming “mathematical
machines” of an incredible power and sophistication. Naturally many talented mathematicians wanted to be in-
volved in the design of those machines. And they tried to invent new ways to speed up computers, to increase
their reliability, and to reduce complexity and cost by using non-trivial computer arithmetic.

Computers Watch the Sky

In 1957, the Russian defense industry started to plan using computers in the radar systems
for the ballistic missile early warning system and space surveillance. It was a very dif-
ficult task at that time due the huge amount of data to be processed in real time, required
memory capacity and reliability of the hardware. By that time, the Russian electronics
industry just released the first commercial domestic transistors. Therefore, decision was
made to design a transistor-based computer M-4 and to appoint Mikhail A. Kartsev, who
earlier actively participated in the development of Bruk’s computers M-1 and M-2, as the
Chief Architect. The designers of M-4 were actively involved at all stages of M-4 produc-
tion and configuration. This experience allowed the team to ensure the highest possible
at that time level of reliability and maintainability. Dozens of the computers M4 and their
modifications M4-2M-3M, spread over thousands of miles of the vast Soviet Union terri-
Mikhail A . Kartsev tory, were merged into a single computer network of the anti-missile defense.
(1923–1983)

M-4 for early warning systems The multiprocessor system M-10

The next step was multiprocessor computers M-9, M-10. The creators of the M-10 succeeded in solving a rather
complicated task: to built a computer with performance was more than 5 million operations per second using
relatively slow chips of a low integration. While on the (largely formal) parameters M-10 trailed Cray-1, it far
exceeded its architectural capabilities: the average number of machine cycles per operation in the M-10 ranged
from 0,9 to 5,3,and from 0,7 to 27,6 in Cray-1. It can be argued that until the early 80s, M-10 was the most pow-
erful computer in the world.
The last creation of Mikhail Kartsev, the vector-pipeline multiprocessor M-13, was transfered into production
only after his death. It is discussed in the “Supercomputers: Testing Limits”.

– 12 –