Caltech Cosmic Cube

{{Short description|Parallel computer}}

The Caltech Cosmic Cube was a parallel computer, developed by Charles Seitz and Geoffrey C Fox from 1981 onward.Cosmic Cubism from Engineering & Science, March 1984 http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3419/1/Cubism.pdf It was the first working hypercube built.{{cite book | last =Anderson | first =A. John | title = Foundations of Computer Technology | year =1994 | publisher =CRC Press | isbn = 978-0412598104 | page=378 }}

It was an early attempt to capitalise on VLSI to speed up scientific calculations at a reasonable cost. Using commodity hardware and an architecture suited to the specific task (QCD), Fox and Seitz demonstrated that this was indeed possible.

In 1984 a group at Intel including Justin Rattner and Cleve Moler developed the Intel iPSC inspired by the Cosmic Cube.{{Cite web |title= The Intel Hypercube, part 1 |date= October 28, 2013 |author= Cleve Moler |author-link= Cleve Moler |url= http://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/2013/10/28/the-intel-hypercube-part-1/ |accessdate= November 4, 2013 }}

In 1987 several people in the group formed a company called Parasoft to commercialize the message passing interface developed for the Cosmic Cube.[http://wotug.org/parallel/documents/misc/timeline/timeline.txt History of Supercomputing]