Cold War Computing

Posted on 3 Aug 2005 at 12:39

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Completed in 1953 by Lebedev's team, BESM-1 used around 5,000 vacuum tubes. Only one reached completion, but it was at the time the fastest in continental Europe. It used floating point to represent numbers using 39-bit binary words. Although it had only 1KB of ferric core memory and another 1KB of read-only subroutines, its four magnetic tape units were capable of storing 30,000 words each. For the high-speed backing store, there were magnetic drums that could store 5,120 words per unit with an access speed of 800 words per second.

The first Russian mainframe also arrived in 1953. The elegant but underpowered Strela was designed and built by the Moscow Plant of Computing Analytical Machines. This giant occupied 300 square metres of floor space, had 43-bit binary floating-point notation and used electron-beam tubes as RAM. The West knew these ingenious devices as Williams Tubes. The principle was that an electron beam could place a dot in any one of several positions on a phosphor screen, representing a binary bit. A mechanism read the places where the dots could appear and refreshed them until told otherwise. Constant refresh mechanisms are still the basis for DRAM today.

The backing store for the Strela came from two magnetic tape units; these stored a combined 1.5 million 43-bit words. For data input, there was a punched card and magnetic tape. Each of Strela's subroutine libraries had 15 programs, which existed as a hardwired collection of diodes, each representing a sequence of up to 16 instructions. The instruction set was surprisingly modern, consisting of logical and arithmetic commands and conditional jumps. But the finished machines were very power-hungry. The central processing unit alone drew 75kW, and the cooling system and peripherals doubled this to 150kW.

Slava Gerovitch says that, despite a meagre 2,000 instructions per second, one of the first Strelas went into service at Moscow's Design Bureau Number One of the Third Chief Directorate. It apparently solved problems relating to the target destruction probability and detonation efficiency of fragmentation warheads.

Eventually, all seven production Strelas worked on nuclear and ballistic missile calculations at the Academy of Sciences' Division of Applied Mathematics. Arguably this was the first cluster, Linux versions of which now form the most powerful computing devices on Earth. In 1954, Strela designer Yuri Bazilevsky and his team received the Stalin Prize of First Degree. Production of the Strela stopped only in 1956.

TAKING LIBERTIES

There was increasing demand for computer time from civil researchers. This led to conflicts with the military over access to the precious machines. In 1955, the Computation Centre of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow became the first non-military computer bureau in Russia, with several computers from various plants to its name. Non-military researchers could supposedly run non-classified programs on these machines.

At least, that was the idea. The problem was that military researchers always had priority and so could muscle in on civilian computing time. By September of that year, the Academy had to set up a review committee to resolve bitter disputes over who should have access to computer time. The committee recommended that at least 20 per cent of the total time available should go to civilian researchers. Stories persist that the committee was composed mostly of military project men who apportioned time according to their needs.