S-1 project
From Stanford CSD History
The S-1 project built a family of multiprocessor supercomputers. The project was envisioned by Lowell Wood at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in 1975 and staffed for the first three years by two Stanford University Computer Science graduate students, Tom McWilliams and Curt Widdoes.
That two graduate students could design and almost completely build a supercomputer by themselves is an amazing feat, comparable to the design and building of the CDC 6600 by Seymour Cray and a small staff a dozen years earlier. However, McWilliams and Widdoes are even better known for the major advances in CAD tools for logic design that they developed as part of the early days of the project and for the startup company they founded, Valid Logic Systems. In this respect the S-1 project was similar to the Super Foonly project.
The project was supported by the US Navy and ramped up in 1978 with the addition of more students, including Mike Farmwald and Jeff Rubin, and again in 1979. Dr. Carl Haussman provided the day-to-day oversight as the project team grew in size.
Five generations of S-1 processors were planned, and two MSI/ECL generations were built. The project independently invented two-bit branch prediction, directory-based cache coherency, and multiprocessor synchronization using load linked and store conditional. The project also influenced the development of programming languages and compilers including Common LISP and gcc.
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Timeline
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
Current Location of Hardware
Historical reference material for the S-1 project is at Clemson University and at Stanford.
