Meiko

Synonyms

Computing surface; CS-2

Definition

Meiko was a UK-based parallel computer company that was founded in 1985 by six employees of Inmos. It grew to a peak of 150 employees based in Bristol and Boston Massachusetts. It ceased to trade in 1996; shortly afterward, some of the communications technology and a small engineering team were transferred to Quadrics.

Discussion

Meiko machines were all distributed memory clusters. There were three distinct machine generations during the 10 years of Meiko’s life: Transputer systems, hybrids that used Transputers for communication and an Intel i860 or SPARC processor, and, finally, SPARC systems in which the Transputers had been replaced by Meiko designed communications ASICs.

At the time of their construction, the takeover of high performance computing by cluster machines had yet to take place, the fastest machines at the time being vector supercomputers form Cray and Japanese vendors. Meiko machines contributed to the demonstration that it...