MasPar

MasPar Computer Corporation was a minisupercomputer vendor that was founded in 1987 by Jeff Kalb. The company was based in Sunnyvale, California.While Kalb was the Vice-President of DEC's VLSI chip-building division, some researchers in that division were building a supercomputer based on the Goodyear MPP (massively parallel processor) supercomputer. The DEC researchers enhanced the architecture by:making the processor elements to be 4-bit instead of 1-bitincreasing the connectivity of each processor element to 8 neighbors from 4.adding a global interconnect for all of the processing elements, which was a triple-redundant switch which was easier to implement than a full crossbar switch.After Digital decided not to commercialize the research project, Kalb decided to start a company to sell this minisupercomputer. In 1990, the first generation product MP-1 was delivered. In 1992, the follow-on MP-2 was shipped. The company shipped more than 200 systems. Samples of MasPar MPs, from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, are in storage at the Computer History Museum.