HPC Computing pioneer Neil Lincoln passes away

Eugene Miya reported last week on Usenet that computer architect Neil Lincoln quietly passed away on January 26. If you haven't heard of Neil before, he was a top supercomputer designer of his time and was an architect of the CDC STAR-100 and CYBER 205, and ETA Systems ETA-10 supercomputers. I'm quite surprised that there is no Wikipedia article about him but that will be remedied soon!

Even if you were aware of Neil, some things that you may not have known him:

• He was a seminary drop-out, Vietnam Vet (Marine Corps) pilot, ex-nightclub singer, and former radio DJ


• As an EE student at Cal Berkeley, he and some friends converted a room in an old house into "The Wire Room", known throughout the campus as the place where a computer was being built by those "without the foggiest notion" of how to go about doing it


• In Vietnam (1962-1963), he was responsible for militarizing an IBM 1401 computer on a bed of a heavy truck.


• He very much disliked the wearing of suits and ties, especially at work!


• He did software too: on a contract with CDC, he led the team that developed the SCOPE 2.0 Operating System for the famous CDC 6600 system, and the associated Fortran compiler

He eventually joined the STAR-100 team in 1967, being led by well-known CDC architects Jim Thornton and Seymour Cray. As you probably know from history, Cray disagreed with the vector-intensive direction of the STAR-100 and went on to form his own famous computer company. Jim Thornton also left CDC to start Network Systems (the Hyper Channel folks), eventually acquired by StorageTek (nowadays, known as Sun Microsystems, of course). Neil Lincoln stayed with CDC and in 1975, became the architect of the CYBER 203/205 systems.

Four (vector) pipe CYBER 205 at Florida State University Computing Center, 1988.



During two short contracting gigs at ETA Systems in St. Paul, MN, 1986 and 1987, I remember seeing Neil quite a bit in the evenings. In 1986 his office was in the middle of a busy corridor near the center of the building and his walls were plastered with individual pages of a calendar datebook, showing the countdown to the important "run a job" milestone (this was simply abbreviated "RAJ" everywhere in the company). With new hardware and a brand new OS, running a batch job from start to finish was the confidence test that would exercise the entire OS/hardware path, including the compilers, scheduler, I/O, filesystem, and of course, the CPU. RAJ did run late and ETA was forced to ship system #1 without a full OS. Jobs could still be run on this system but they had to be started in "monitor mode" with no scheduler running. To get Fortran programs running on the ETA at FSU in January 1987, we compiled them on the adjacent CYBER 205, and moved the binaries to the ETA Service Unit with none other than the trusty Kermit communications program, which always seemed to "just work", no matter what system it was running on.

In those days of very expensive supercomputers, new generations of hardware had to be marketed long before they were available, to ensure a decent pipeline of customers at FCS time. In fact, it went farther than this: systems were sold before FCS with contracts that had financial penalties if they were not delivered and accepted by the customer by a certain date. As such, Neil was often asked to talk with incoming customer delegations that were visiting the plant. The evenings, I'm guessing, were his time to get away from meetings and concentrate on the engineering issues of the day. As chief engineer of the ETA-10, he was overseeing new hardware, new cooling (the CPU boards were submerged in liquid nitrogen), and a complex new operating system that was being designed to "host" other OS environments, like Unix. Needless to say, there was not a shortage of engineering challenges in any of these areas.

The ETA Systems software development environment was on Apollo Domain workstations running Apollo's DSEE software engineering environment. Workstations were a shared resource back then, and were not on individual desktops but rather were maintained in various communal areas, like along the windows and in various "war" rooms. You could still do development on a VT220 clone terminal back in your cube, but a workstation was the platform of choice, if you could find an available one. Being away from home with usually no other things to do, and very curious about Apollo's Domain OS/DSEE, I tended to hang around in the evenings when workstations were more available, and it was during this time that I saw Neil a lot. Sometimes he would say "Hi" and one time he stopped by and we talked about the stuff I was working on (Service Unit diagnostics). Even when you could tell the deadline pressure was getting to him, he would always manage a smile. During my second stint there in 1987, when the Lachman and Associates SVR4 UNIX port was up and running on ETA hardware, you could see Neil working at a Unix prompt on one of his systems, looking like he was having fun.

Me in 1988 with ETA Systems ETA-10, Serial Number 1, Florida State University Computing Center, Tallahassee, FL.

Rob Peglar's Saga of ETA Systems from 1990 makes great reading for anyone interested in the ETA Systems story, including his assessment of the business and technical reasons for its eventual failure in 1989. I have some opinions and observations about the complex operating system development effort that was happening at ETA, but that's for another blog.

From a Usenet posting I made back in 2001, I still enjoy reading Neil Lincon's honest assessment of his own computer, the STAR-100, in what did work and what didn't. Computer language enthusiasts may be interested in the APL influence on the STAR-100.

With HPC computing making what seems like a strong comeback, it's important to remember the pioneers of HPC. Neil R. Lincoln is certainly a hall-of-fame member of that club.

Posted at 08:19PM Feb 13, 2007 by Peter Schow in Industry  |  Comments[4]