Products
ETA had only one product, the ETA-10. It was a derivative of the CDC Cyber 205 supercomputer, and deliberately kept compatibility with it. Like the Cyber 205, 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, each capable of 4 double-precision or 8 single-precision operations per clock cycle, and up to 18 I/O processors.
The main reason for the ETA-10's speed was the use of liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling in some models to cool the CPUs. Even though it was based on then-current CMOS technologies, the low temperature allowed the CPUs to operate with a ~7 ns cycle time, 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.
The planned successor to the ETA-10 was the 30 GFLOPS ETA-30.
Software
Software for the ETA-10 line was initially regarded as a disaster. When CDC and ETA first designed the ETA architecture, they made the conscious decision not to merely port the CDC VSOS operating system from the existing CDC Cyber 205. It was felt by both the vendor, and the existing customer base (who wrongly believed that their vendor knew best), that a new OS needed to be written to extract the best performance from the hardware.
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When the first ETA-10 E initially shipped in 1986 there was no operating system for the machines. Programs had to be loaded one at a time from an attached Apollo Computer workstation, run, and then the supercomputer rebooted to run the next program.
At the time Unix was making major inroads into the supercomputing fields, but ETA decided to write their own EOS operating system, which wasn't ready when the first machines were delivered in late 1986 and early 1987. An operating system based on UNIX System V became available in 1988, as a result of porting work done under contract by the Canadian firm HCR Corporation, at which point it looked like the machine might finally succeed. Many sites that had refused to pay for their machines due to the low quality of EOS found ETA's UNIX completely usable and were willing to accept delivery.
ETA's demise was not based solely on operating system choice or existence. The Fortran compiler (ftn200) had not changed significantly from the CDC205. This compiler retained vendor-specific programming performance features (known as the Q8* subroutine calls) in an era when supercomputer users were realizing the necessity of source code portability between architectures. Additionally, the compiler optimizations were not keeping up with existing technology as shown by the Japanese supercomputer vendors such as NEC, or at Cray Research and the newer minisupercomputer makers.
In general, computer hardware manufacturers prior and up to that period tended to be weak on software. Libraries and available commercial and non-commercial (soon to be called open-source) applications help an installed base of machines. CDC was relatively weak in this area.
