USA · decommissioned · hpc

ETA10

Also known as ETA-10E (serial 1)

Operated by Florida State University at FSU Supercomputer Computations Research Institute .

Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.

Measured performance

Rmax: -
Rpeak: 10.0 GFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: -
Cores: 8
Power: -
Per watt: - GF/W

Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.

What this machine is made of

One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.

Role	Part	Supplier at build	Quantity	Confidence	Source
Integrator	- ETA Systems	ETA Systems	-	Verified	docs.rcc.fsu.edu ed-thelen.org
CPU	ETA10 CPU CPUs ETA10 (custom CMOS) · 1C · 0.095 GHz ETA-10E/ETA-10G, up to eight processors	ETA Systems	8 reported	Verified	docs.rcc.fsu.edu ed-thelen.org
Cooling	ETA10 liquid nitrogen cooling Cooling Liquid-nitrogen-cooled ETA-10E/G CPU modules	ETA Systems	-	Verified	docs.rcc.fsu.edu en.wikipedia.org

The read

ETA Systems, a 1983 spinoff from Control Data Corporation built to compete with Cray, shipped ETA10 serial number 1 to Florida State University's Supercomputer Computations Research Institute (SCRI) on 5 January 1987; the system was formally announced in April 1987 at that same installation. By fall 1987 it had been upgraded to full ETA-10E specification (10.5 ns cycle, 4 million words of local memory per CPU, 128 million words shared memory) and FSU's own account describes a 'world record' multiprocessor run of 6 gigaflips that autumn. CDC abruptly closed ETA Systems on 17 April 1989, and FSU's own history page states the ETA10 was exchanged for a comparably equipped Cray Y-MP in November 1989, while a separate, independent computing-history account (ed-thelen.org) gives the final ETA-10G unit's removal as March 1990. Both dates are recorded here rather than silently reconciled; this row uses FSU's own November 1989 date as decommissioned_date. Notable for CMOS logic cooled in liquid nitrogen on its highest-end models (see eta10-ln2-cooling) and for FSU's own characterization of it as an unusually interactive machine once it ran under UNIX rather than batch-only VSOS.

Timeline

1987-01 First operational source
1987-04 Announced source
1989-11 Decommissioned source

Site & facility

FSU Supercomputer Computations Research Institute

Location: Tallahassee, FL, USA
Commissioned: 1984

docs.rcc.fsu.edu ed-thelen.org

Change history

2026-09-24 ETA10 added

Source check

We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.

Cited source	Result	Found on the page
docs.rcc.fsu.edu	names system, part and count	ETA10 CPU, ETA10 liquid nitrogen cooling · counts: 8
ed-thelen.org	names system only	· counts: 8

Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.