Re:$30M Raised to Redo the CPU
by fentonc on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @10:06AM
(#50454317)
I have a 64-node chunk of an NCube/10 that I was able to reverse engineer enough to get up and running! That thing is everything you could want in a 1980s supercomputer, it has a great architecture.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Oh, nice. Stanford had a 64-node NCube at one point. They got it from an oil company, which found it not useful. The case was a 1 meter cube, with slots for 16 huge boards, each with 64 CPUs. Only one board was present. One CPU was broken, and the architecture was such that you were then limited to 32 CPUs for a job.
Other than a chess program, it was unused. It was shipped off to some other school.
Same machine, with one broken CPU? Few of those things were made, so it might be.
This one came from Caltech, and was just a bare board (but thought to be working). I had to make a backplane and case for it, and then reverse engineer the serial protocol to build a USB-to-NCube adapter. I've only managed to get code running on a single CPU, but it's on my todo list to try multi-node.