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IBM 7030 Stretch
The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first transistorized supercomputer. Originally designed to meet a requirement formulated by Edward Teller at Lawrence Livermore, the first example was delivered to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1961, and a second customized version, the IBM 7950 Harvest, to the National Security Agency in 1962.
Its failure to meet its aggressive performance estimates forced its price to be dropped from $13.5 million to only $7.78 million and its withdrawal from sales to customers beyond those having already negotiated contracts. Even though the 7030 was much slower than expected, it was the fastest computer in the world from 1961 until the first CDC 6600 became operational in 1964. ''PC World'' magazine named Stretch as one of the biggest project management failures in IT history.
The Fortran complier delivered by IBM with the STRETCH installed at AWRE Aldermaston proved to be quite inadequate and Alick Glennie and others at AWRE created the much faster S1, S2 and S3 Fortran compliers, with variable sized arrays (set without recompiling via a PRELUDE module) and other features.[〕]
In spite of Stretch's failure to meet its own performance goals, it served as the basis for many of the design features of the fantastically successful IBM System/360, which shipped in 1964. The project lead was initially blackballed for his role in the "failure", but as the success of the 360 became obvious he was given an official apology and was made an IBM Fellow.
==Development history==
In early 1955, Dr. Edward Teller of the University of California Radiation Laboratory wanted a new scientific computing system for three-dimensional hydrodynamic calculations. Proposals were requested from IBM and UNIVAC for this new system, to be called ''Livermore Automatic Reaction Calculator'' or LARC. According to IBM executive Cuthbert Hurd, such a system would cost roughly $2.5 million and would run at one to two MIPS. Delivery was to be two to three years after the contract was signed.
At IBM, a small team at Poughkeepsie including John Griffith and Gene Amdahl worked on the design proposal. Just after they finished and were about to present the proposal, Ralph Palmer stopped them and said, "It's a mistake." The proposed design would have been built with either point-contact transistors or surface-barrier transistors, both likely to be soon outperformed by the then newly invented diffusion transistor.
IBM returned to Livermore and stated that they were withdrawing from the contract, and instead proposed a dramatically better system, "We are not going to build that machine for you; we want to build something better! We do not know precisely what it will take but we think it will be another million dollars and another year, and we do not know how fast it will run but we would like to shoot for ten million instructions per second." Livermore was not impressed, and in May 1955 they announced that UNIVAC had won the LARC contract, now called the ''Livermore Automatic Research Computer''. LARC would eventually be delivered in June 1960.
In September 1955, fearing that Los Alamos National Laboratory might also order a LARC, IBM submitted a preliminary proposal for a high-performance binary computer based on the improved version of the design that Livermore had rejected, which they received with interest. In January 1956, Project Stretch was formally initiated. In November 1956, IBM won the contract with the aggressive performance goal of a "speed at least 100 times the IBM 704" (i.e. 4 MIPS). Delivery was slated for 1960.
During design, it proved necessary to reduce the clock speeds, making it clear that Stretch could not meet its aggressive performance goals, but estimates of performance ranged from 60 to 100 times the IBM 704. In 1960, the price of $13.5 million was set for the IBM 7030. In 1961, actual benchmarks indicated that the performance of the IBM 7030 was only about 30 times the IBM 704 (i.e. 1.2 MIPS), causing considerable embarrassment for IBM. In May 1961, Tom Watson announced a price cut of all 7030s under negotiation to $7.78 million and immediate withdrawal of the product from further sales.
Its floating-point addition time was 1.38-1.5 microseconds, multiplication time was 2.48-2.70 microseconds, and division time was 9.00-9.90 microseconds.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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