Manchester computers

The Manchester computers were an innovative series of stored-program electronic computers developed during the 30-year period between 1947 and 1977 by a small team at the University of Manchester, under the leadership of Tom Kilburn.^[1] They included the world's first stored-program computer, the world's first transistorised computer, and what was the world's fastest computer at the time of its inauguration in 1962.^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]

The project began with two aims: to prove the practicality of the Williams tube, an early form of computer memory based on standard cathode-ray tubes (CRTs); and to construct a machine that could be used to investigate how computers might be able to assist in the solution of mathematical problems.^[6] The first of the series, the Manchester Baby, ran its first program on 21 June 1948.^[2] As the world's first stored-program computer, the Baby, and the Manchester Mark 1 developed from it, quickly attracted the attention of the United Kingdom government, who contracted the electrical engineering firm of Ferranti to produce a commercial version. The resulting machine, the Ferranti Mark 1, was the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer.^[7]

The collaboration with Ferranti eventually led to an industrial partnership with the computer company ICL, who made use of many of the ideas developed at the university, particularly in the design of their 2900 series of computers during the 1970s.^[8]^[9]^[10]

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In about 1966 I asked Professor Kilburn, why is it whenever I open a computer science textbook I get the American origins of computers but the Brits are nowhere? So Tom took his pipe out of his mouth and said those who need to know do know What was special about the Baby was that such a computer can be used for a wide variety, perhaps almost an infinite variety of problems It was an engineering testbed to test out the reliability of a memory invention The central problem of the computer was recognised to be the problem of storage and so the problem was quite simply brought to my notice Cathode ray tubes were used widely during the second world war for radar purposes It's a way of displaying electronic signals on a screen that you can see In a Williams and Kilburn storage tube each little element of the screen was excited by the electrons and became charged and each area of stored charge was made to represent a binary digit, a 1 or a 0 F.C. was a member of the telecommunication research establishment which was called TRE At the end of the war he was offered a post at Manchester university and he accepted with enthusiasm and he took one of his chaps, Tom Kilburn and also asked for other bright young men, so I was the next one It was a very exciting time, there were a very small number of people who worked together very closely indeed Tom Kilburn worked on the CRT memory and in about a year he'd actually moved from one bit of storage to one thousand to two thousand bits of storage In December '47 what had arrived was a memory which could show static pictures now what we needed to check was that those pictures could actually change, be recorded properly, and do that at electronic speeds. That's really why the Baby was built It consisted of 6 ft 6" high post office racks, 23 inches wide all round the laboratory It was just a simple room It had no air conditioning so we always had windows open and things in those days, you know, to keep the temperature sensible This was the centre of Manchester and in with the fresh air came the dirt Tom and I wore lab coats a long coat down to your mid-thighs or knees We avoided electric shocks by the classic artifice of keeping one hand in your pocket all the time and never to touch anything with both hands at once We had a couple of technical staff who did did the actual building One of the best wiremen we had was Ida Fitzgerald I think was her surname She delivered the chassis wired to our diagram and we would look at it and say oh dear, I didn't mean to do that and we would proceed to alter Ida's neat wiring Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill had been struggling for some days The machine kept failing, perhaps it was a wiring error or some soldered joint had failed and then one day it all held together and worked not just once but twice but three times and they realised we've made it Finally when we pressed the start button it set off on this usual dance of death and then suddenly it stopped and there in the expected line was the expected answer so we'd built a computing machine We went out to lunch in the canteen as usual, and we were actually having lunch instead of having brought in sandwiches, that was the way we celebrated What was needed now was to develop both the programming side and the arithmetic side to develop this universal machine The Baby was then expanded over the next 18 months to create the Manchester University Mark 1 computer. It was made about three times bigger, it had a lot more store and so on By then, as far as the engineers were concerned, the Baby computer was old hat There's nothing left at all of the Baby or the expanded Baby In fact the racks that the Baby and the expanded Baby were built on were used for the next machine that we built In 1994 I realised that in four years time it would be the 50th anniversary of the Baby computer. I put together a proposal as to how we could build a replica of that original machine Tom Kilburn and I both vetted it and approved it and as we said to each other when we saw it, oh this is all wrong of course, it's nice and clean We completed the replica build and re-enacted the running of the world's first program They operated the switches, the program ran, they stood back, watched it on the display tube, saw the answer was correct and then turned away and grinned at the audience, as if to say there we can do it again Normally the people who did the original work tend to fade into obscurity In England it's scientists and theoreticians who tend to get the glory It's good that we remember the contribution of the electronic engineers to the information age, to the second industrial revolution if you like Manchester University now has a Tom Kilburn building which in fact contains two laboratories known as the Tootill laboratories Computers are everywhere today in places unimaginable to the pioneers The Baby started off with a thousand bits of storage and now there's so much storage everywhere, you know a million million million amount of storage, that in my terms is science fiction How do you foresee the development of computers over the next decade? I'm not really interested in computers, I made one and I thought one out of one was a good score so I didn't make any more

Manchester Baby

The Manchester Baby was designed as a test-bed for the Williams tube, an early form of computer memory, rather than as a practical computer. Work on the machine began in 1947, and on 21 June 1948 the computer successfully ran its first program, consisting of 17 instructions written to find the highest proper factor of 2¹⁸ (262,144) by trying every integer from 2¹⁸ − 1 downwards. The program ran for 52 minutes before producing the correct answer of 2¹⁷ (131,072).^[11]

The Baby was 17 feet (5.2 m) in length, 7 feet 4 inches (2.24 m) tall, and weighed almost 1 long ton. It contained 550 thermionic valves – 300 diodes and 250 pentodes – and had a power consumption of 3.5 kilowatts.^[12] Its successful operation was reported in a letter to the journal Nature published in September 1948,^[13] establishing it as the world's first stored-program computer.^[14] It quickly evolved into a more practical machine, the Manchester Mark 1.

Manchester Mark 1

Development of the Manchester Mark 1 began in August 1948, with the initial aim of providing the university with a more realistic computing facility.^[15] In October 1948 UK Government Chief Scientist Ben Lockspeiser was given a demonstration of the prototype, and was so impressed that he immediately initiated a government contract with the local firm of Ferranti to make a commercial version of the machine, the Ferranti Mark 1.^[7]

Two versions of the Manchester Mark 1 were produced, the first of which, the Intermediary Version, was operational by April 1949.^[15] The Final Specification machine, which was fully working by October 1949,^[16] contained 4,050 valves and had a power consumption of 25 kilowatts.^[17] Perhaps the Manchester Mark 1's most significant innovation was its incorporation of index registers, commonplace on modern computers.^[18]

In June 2022 an IEEE Milestone was dedicated to the "Manchester University "Baby" Computer and its Derivatives, 1948-1951".^[19]

Meg and Mercury

As a result of experience gained from the Mark 1, the developers concluded that computers would be used more in scientific roles than pure maths. They therefore embarked on the design of a new machine which would include a floating-point unit; work began in 1951. The resulting machine, which ran its first program in May 1954, was known as Meg, or the megacycle machine. It was smaller and simpler than the Mark 1, as well as quicker at solving maths problems. Ferranti produced a commercial version marketed as the Ferranti Mercury, in which the Williams tubes were replaced by the more reliable core memory.^[20]

Transistor Computer

Work on building a smaller and cheaper computer began in 1952, in parallel with Meg's ongoing development. Two of Kilburn's team, Richard Grimsdale and D. C. Webb, were assigned to the task of designing and building a machine using the newly developed transistors instead of valves, which became known as the Manchester TC.^[21] Initially the only devices available were germanium point-contact transistors; these were less reliable than the valves they replaced but consumed far less power.^[22]

Two versions of the machine were produced. The first was the world's first transistorised computer,^[23] a prototype, and became operational on 16 November 1953.^[3]^[24] "The 48-bit machine used 92 point-contact transistors and 550 diodes".^[25] The second version was completed in April 1955. The 1955 version used 250 junction transistors,^[25] 1,300 solid-state diodes, and had a power consumption of 150 watts. The machine^{[clarification needed]} did however make use of valves to generate its 125 kHz clock waveforms and in the circuitry to read and write on its magnetic drum memory, so it was not the first completely transistorised computer, a distinction that went to the Harwell CADET of 1955.^[26]

Problems with the reliability of early batches of transistors meant that the machine's^{[clarification needed]} mean time between failures was about 90 minutes, which improved once the more reliable junction transistors became available.^[27] The Transistor Computer's design was adopted by the local engineering firm of Metropolitan-Vickers in their Metrovick 950, in which all the circuitry was modified to make use of junction transistors. Six Metrovick 950s were built, the first completed in 1956. They were successfully deployed within various departments of the company and were in use for about five years.^[23]

Muse and Atlas

Development of MUSE – a name derived from "microsecond engine" – began at the university in 1956. The aim was to build a computer that could operate at processing speeds approaching one microsecond per instruction, one million instructions per second.^[28] Mu (or μ) is a prefix in the SI and other systems of units denoting a factor of 10⁻⁶ (one millionth).

At the end of 1958 Ferranti agreed to collaborate with Manchester University on the project, and the computer was shortly afterwards renamed Atlas, with the joint venture under the control of Tom Kilburn. The first Atlas was officially commissioned on 7 December 1962, and was considered at that time to be the most powerful computer in the world, equivalent to four IBM 7094s.^[29] It was said that whenever Atlas went offline half of the UK's computer capacity was lost.^[30] Its fastest instructions took 1.59 microseconds to execute, and the machine's use of virtual storage and paging allowed each concurrent user to have up to one million words of storage space available. Atlas pioneered many hardware and software concepts still in common use today including the Atlas Supervisor, "considered by many to be the first recognisable modern operating system".^[31]

Two other machines were built: one for a joint British Petroleum/University of London consortium, and the other for the Atlas Computer Laboratory at Chilton near Oxford. A derivative system was built by Ferranti for Cambridge University, called the Titan or Atlas 2, which had a different memory organisation, and ran a time-sharing operating system developed by Cambridge Computer Laboratory.^[30]

The University of Manchester's Atlas was decommissioned in 1971,^[32] but the last was in service until 1974.^[33] Parts of the Chilton Atlas are preserved by the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh.

In June 2022 an IEEE Milestone was dedicated to the "Atlas Computer and the Invention of Virtual Memory 1957–1962".^[34]

MU5

The Manchester MU5 was the successor to Atlas. An outline proposal for a successor to Atlas was presented at the 1968 IFIP Conference in Edinburgh,^[35] although work on the project and talks with ICT (of which Ferranti had become part) aimed at obtaining their assistance and support had begun in 1966. The new machine, later to become known as MU5, was intended to be at the top end of a range of machines and to be 20 times faster than Atlas.

In 1968 the Science Research Council (SRC) awarded Manchester University a five-year grant of £630,466 (equivalent to £9.94 million in 2019)^[a] to develop the machine and ICT, later to become ICL, made its production facilities available to the University. In that year a group of 20 people was involved in the design: 11 Department of Computer Science staff, 5 seconded ICT staff and 4 SRC supported staff. The peak level of staffing was in 1971, when the numbers, including research students, rose to 60.^[36]

The most significant novel features of the MU5 processor were its instruction set and the use of associative memory to speed up operand and instruction accesses. The instruction set was designed to permit the generation of efficient object code by compilers, to allow for a pipeline organisation of the processor and to provide information to the hardware on the nature of operands, so as to allow them to be optimally buffered. Thus named variables were buffered separately from array elements, which were themselves accessed by means of named descriptors. Each descriptor included an array length which could be used in string processing instructions or to enable array bound checking to be carried out by hardware. The instruction pre-fetching mechanism used an associative jump trace to predict the outcome of impending branches.^[37]

The MU5 operating system MUSS^[38]^[39] was designed to be highly adaptable and was ported to a variety of processors at Manchester and elsewhere. In the completed MU5 system, three processors (MU5 itself, an ICL 1905E and a PDP-11), as well as a number of memories and other devices, were interconnected by a high-speed Exchange.^[40]^[41] All three processors ran a version of MUSS. MUSS also encompassed compilers for various languages and runtime packages to support the compiled code. It was structured as a small kernel that implemented an arbitrary set of virtual machines analogous to a corresponding set of processors. The MUSS code appeared in the common segments that formed part of each virtual machine's virtual address space.

MU5 was fully operational by October 1974, coinciding with ICL's announcement that it was working on the development of a new range of computers, the 2900 series. ICL's 2980 in particular, first delivered in June 1975, owed a great deal to the design of MU5.^[42] MU5 remained in operation at the University until 1982.^[43] A fuller article about MU5 can be found on the Engineering and Technology History Wiki.^[44]

MU6

Once MU5 was fully operational, a new project was initiated to produce its successor, MU6. MU6 was intended to be a range of processors: MU6P,^[45] an advanced microprocessor architecture intended for use as a personal computer, MU6-G,^[46] a high performance machine for general or scientific applications and MU6V,^[47] a parallel vector processing system. A prototype model of MU6V, based on 68000 microprocessors with vector orders emulated as "extracodes" was constructed and tested but not further developed beyond this. MU6-G was built with a grant from SRC and successfully ran as a service machine in the Department between 1982 and 1987,^[4] using the MUSS operating system developed as part of the MU5 project.

SpiNNaker

SpiNNaker: Spiking Neural Network Architecture is a massively parallel, manycore supercomputer architecture designed by Steve Furber in the University of Manchester's Advanced Processor Technologies Research Group (APT).^[48] Built in 2019, it is composed of 57,600 ARM9 processors (specifically ARM968), each with 18 cores and 128 MB of mobile DDR SDRAM, totalling 1,036,800 cores and over 7 TB of RAM.^[49] The computing platform is based on spiking neural networks, useful in simulating the human brain (see Human Brain Project).^[50]^[51]^[52]^[53]^[54]^[55]^[56]^[57]^[58]

Summary

Chronology of developments
Year	University Prototype	Year	Commercial Computer
1948	Manchester Baby, which evolved into the Manchester Mark 1	1951	Ferranti Mark 1
1953	Transistor computer	1956	Metrovick 950
1954	Manchester Mark II a.k.a. "Meg"	1957	Ferranti Mercury
1959	Muse	1962	Ferranti Atlas, Titan
1974	MU5	1974	ICL 2900 Series

References

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^ Plana, L. A.; Furber, S. B.; Temple, S.; Khan, M.; Shi, Y.; Wu, J.; Yang, S. (2007). "A GALS Infrastructure for a Massively Parallel Multiprocessor". IEEE Design & Test of Computers. 24 (5): 454. doi:10.1109/MDT.2007.149. S2CID 16758888. A description of the Globally Asynchronous, Locally Synchronous (GALS) nature of SpiNNaker, with an overview of the asynchronous communications hardware designed to transmit neural 'spikes' between processors.
^ Navaridas, J.; Luján, M.; Miguel-Alonso, J.; Plana, L. A.; Furber, S. (2009). "Understanding the interconnection network of SpiNNaker". Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Conference on Supercomputing - ICS '09. p. 286. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.634.9481. doi:10.1145/1542275.1542317. ISBN 9781605584980. S2CID 3710084. Modelling and analysis of the SpiNNaker interconnect in a million-core machine, showing the suitability of the packet-switched network for large-scale spiking neural network simulation.
^ Rast, A.; Galluppi, F.; Davies, S.; Plana, L.; Patterson, C.; Sharp, T.; Lester, D.; Furber, S. (2011). "Concurrent heterogeneous neural model simulation on real-time neuromimetic hardware". Neural Networks. 24 (9): 961–978. doi:10.1016/j.neunet.2011.06.014. PMID 21778034. A demonstration of SpiNNaker's ability to simulate different neural models (simultaneously, if necessary) in contrast to other neuromorphic hardware.
^ Sharp, T.; Galluppi, F.; Rast, A.; Furber, S. (2012). "Power-efficient simulation of detailed cortical microcircuits on SpiNNaker". Journal of Neuroscience Methods. 210 (1): 110–118. doi:10.1016/j.jneumeth.2012.03.001. PMID 22465805. S2CID 19083072. Four-chip, real-time simulation of a four-million-synapse cortical circuit, showing the extreme energy efficiency of the SpiNNaker architecture

Notes

^ United Kingdom Gross Domestic Product deflator figures follow the MeasuringWorth "consistent series" supplied in Thomas, Ryland; Williamson, Samuel H. (2018). "What Was the U.K. GDP Then?". MeasuringWorth. Retrieved 2 February 2020.

This page was last edited on 16 May 2024, at 03:15

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