Cold War Computing

Posted on 3 Aug 2005 at 12:39

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Things were no better elsewhere. Nuclear researchers, led by Igor Kurchatov, and the designers of missiles and spacecraft, led by Sergei Korolev, used up all the computing time they could find.

In James Hartford's book Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon, Cosmonaut Gregorii Grechko recalled his experiences of trying to secure time as a young researcher on a typical machine: "Kurchatov's people used it in the daytime and during the night Korolev's people [used it]. As for the rest of Soviet science, maybe five minutes [was allowed] for the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy [and] half an hour for the chemical industry."

Meanwhile, at Secret Laboratory Number One near Kiev, Lebedev's next triumph was 1958's BESM-2 computer. This became the first machine designed by Lebedev's team to go into full production. According to the Russian Virtual Computer Museum, the team, now numbering around 150, completed and shipped several dozen machines to institutes around Russia and even exported one to China.

The BESM-2 was a major improvement on earlier models. Again, it was a 39-bit machine, with a 39-bit memory bus. It doubled the size of the ferric core RAM to 2KB, with an impressive access speed of 10 microseconds. Processor speed was 10,000 instructions per second, but this was still very slow by Western standards. External storage came in the form of magnetic tape and drum storage. The BESM-2 also used punched tape entry, which it could read at 20 characters per second. Production ceased in 1962.

SIX SENSE

By 1960, the Soviet military began to see the computer's potential for planning, logistics and battlefield simulation. They wanted greater number-crunching power. In 1967, the BESM-6 became the first Soviet supercomputer and it entered full production a year later.

Running at a then staggering one million instructions per second (MIPS), the BESM-6 had 192KB of ferric core memory, magnetic disk, drum and tape storage, punched card and paper tape input and even a few video terminals. The main memory and the control and logic units could all work at top speed and in parallel, thanks to a system of buffers between them, which stored intermediate results as they became available. To speed execution further, cache memory stored frequently used instructions to reduce the time taken to fetch them from RAM. The RAM featured stratification, which meant that several peripherals could access it simultaneously and made it possible to run a true time-sharing operating system.

However, what gave this 10MHz machine supercomputer performance was its ability to be at different stages of processing up to 14 instructions in parallel at any one time. Lebedev called this 'the principle of water pipe' in his notes. We would recognise it as the technique of pipelining instructions to improve the throughput of modern chips. Though Lebedev died in 1974, the 355th and final BESM-6 was produced as late as 1987.

FOLLOW THE LEADER

Lebedev invented pipelining independently, but much of the technology used in the BESM-6 wasn't Russian. It was copied from IBM. The Soviet leadership had started to view American systems enviously, and the order eventually came from the top to abandon many new developments and simply copy whatever IBM was doing.

In 1968, with help from the KGB, there began a project to clone the IBM System/360. This powerful machine was widely used in the West and even helped put man on the moon. Officially, the initial design of the cloned machines came from the Moscow Scientific Research Centre for Electronic Computer Machinery. However, the plans and even pieces of hardware reportedly came from the West.